Friday, February 20, 2009

Whoa

This is a really neat new feature of the Northeastern University library catalog:

Unless you spend the next 10 minutes taking screen shots and blogging about it, this is really convenient. And it saves our precious reserves of little scraps of paper.

3 comments:

steck said...

You don't remember the days of the NU Dodge Library. It was, ummm, dodgy. I'm not sure they'd even discovered the card catalog, let alone an online catalog.

Online library catalogs are great fodder for neat hacks. Here's one, which I stole and modified from ... I don't remember who.

If your local library supports catalog lookups via CGI, and that CGI uses ISBN numbers, you can use this.

Create a bookmark in your browser, with (a suitably-modified version of) the following Javascript:

javascript:var%20re=/([\/-]|is[bs]n=)(\d{7,9}[\dX])/i;
if(re.test(location.href)==true){var%20isbn=RegExp.$2;void(win=window.open(
'http://catalog.multcolib.org'+'/search/
i?SEARCH='+isbn+'&searchscope=1&submit=Search','LibraryLookup',
'resizeable=1,scrollbars=1,
location=1,width=800,height=600,
menubar=1'))}

Find a book on Amazon.com -- its
URL contains the ISBN. Now click
on the bookmark link -- you'll get
a browser window showing the library holding(s) for that book, if it exists. This code works for a library in a certain US West coast city. You'll have to sort out the API for your local library.

-- Paul

shapr said...

I can't find your email address anywhere, though I'm sure I had it at one point. Would you like to attend a Haskell User's Group in Waltham this Saturday?

I've created a mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/bostonhaskell

Dave Herman said...

Not sure if I can make it but I will see. Thanks for the invite!

Incidentally, my email address is available from my home page:

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dherman
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