Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Quick start: Left-click and hold the button down as you drag this link -- Library -- to your browser's bookmarks/links toolbar

One of the handiest things I ever discovered on the Web was called Library Lookup: Clicking a link on my browser's bookmarks toolbar when I was at a book's page at Amazon would open the title in my local library catalog. From there I could see if the library owned it, request it from any library that owned it, and get a robocall from the library when the book had arrived at the branch I'd selected for delivery.

Nothing is cooler than free books from the library.

The link worked beautifully until the Rhode Island CLAN library system changed its name and link to Ocean State Libraries -- that one's worth bookmarking.

That link goes to a new Encore interface there, and I learned, poking around librarians' sites, that Encore can't look up a book by its ISBN number, which is how the Library Lookup bookmarklet works. Fortunately, you can still use the link to the classic catalog search interface, called Innovative, where the old bookmarklet pointed.

So finally, yesterday, I worked out the new bookmarklet and it works again. How to set it up in your own browser:

First, install the bookmarklet using the instructions below. After that, when you're on a book's page at an online bookseller's (or any other page with just one book's ISBN number), and decide you'd like to borrow it from the library, click the "OS Libraries" link just above your browser window. A separate pop-up window will open that has already searched the statewide library systems for the book; in Firefox, in may open a new tab next to the book's page tab.

Here is the bookmarklet code:

Left-click and hold the button down as you drag this link -- OS Libraries -- to your browser's bookmarks toolbar (it may start with Home, Bookmarks, etc., although mine below has more granular links.) In I.E., this is Favorites--> Links).

If your links toolbar is crowded, you may want to shorten the "OS Libraries" link text to something short like PPL (as I did, at far right in the toolbar above) or Lib. To do that, right-click the bookmarklet link, select Properties, and edit the Name field.

If you don't see such a toolbar, or if this install doesn't work right off the bat, try these more detailed instructions written for a different bookmarklet. You may need to tell your browser's security features that this one is okay to allow.

If the hardcover page shows no results, try the paperback versions, and vice versa. Libraries may own either. In the example above, there were no results until I went to the page of the original 1984 paperback version. That's the one a couple of libraries bought, as you can see below.

From there you can click the "Request" icon, which will prompt you to log in with your library-card number and select a pick-up location. Or, if you see it's on the shelf at your local branch, just go there and check it out.

Be sure to select a pick-up location, and try to space out your requests. If you go nuts with your requests you could end up with 15 books arriving at once, all due three weeks later.

I put the bookmarklet link on the right side of the projo.com Books page, in case you don't get around to this right away.

Not from Rhode Island? The originator of Library Lookup, Jon Udell (his blog), maintains a page to help you make a bookmarklet for other library systems as well. Links at the bottom of that last page to InfoWorld pages no longer work; in 2006 Udell left InfoWorld for Microsoft, and his pages have been scrubbed.