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  Saturday, December 14, 2002 

The power of ISBN

Geoff at the Blog Driver's Waltz asks:

Kenton or Peter (or Piyapong) - can you make this happen with Sirsi? That's so cool. [the Blog Driver's Waltz]

Wow! Check out all those libraries. But, sadly, Sirsi doesn't seem to support ISBN queries. I can see I'm about to learn more about library science than I ever planned to. Jenny wrote yesterday saying:

I sent news of your Librarylookup bookmarklet to the WEB4LIB mailing list, and I got an interesting response from Thomas Dowling:

"Simultaneously, the OpenURL list is nodding in sage agreement that the ISBN is nearly useless for identifying a text. OhioLINK gave up on ISBN-based links several years ago, except as an absolute last resort."

Hmm. Might want to rethink that.

 

A web of libraries

John Gøtze has an update on the Danish interlibrary system, bibliotek.dk:

Because we have bibliotek.dk which is not a library, but a database of holdings in all danish libraries, the bookmarklet searches all public libraries at once. Via bibliotek.dk, you can send an order to your local library (regardless of which library owns the material) and after a few days pick up the material from your own library. [Gotzeblogged]

Excellent!

 

LibraryLookup, Voyager edition

The LibraryLookup project has added support for another vendor of library systems: Endeavor. Thanks to Marcy Leversee of Antioch New England, a graduate school in my hometown of Keene, NH, for making me aware of Endeavor. Yesterday, Marcy pointed me to their customer list. I saved a copy immediately (in case it should mysteriously disappear!), and was able to spider a list of 86 libraries mentioned on that page, or on the pages it points to.

The result: LibraryLookup (Voyager).

The list has some prestigious names: National Library of Medicine, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Museum of Modern Art. But it's much shorter than the Innovative version, partly because many of the names have no links I could follow. As an experiment, I'm going to include a comment link on this post. If your Voyager library isn't on the list, and you'd like it to be, please add a comment in the following format:

HARTFORD SEMINARY|http://opac.hartsem.edu/

In other words: the name of your library, a vertical bar, and an URL. The URL is not necessarily the same as your institution's homepage. To find out what's needed here, do a Voyager search, capture the URL, and throw away /cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi and everything after that.

Here's the comment link.

 


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