libarylookup:: auckland region public libraries
October 20 2007I’ve used Jon Udell’s LibraryLookup bookmarklet for doing lookups against the University of Auckland Library for quite some time. It’s a great tool that provides you with a quick way of seeing whether a book of interest is available in your local library. Say you’re looking at an interesting read on Amazon, click on LibraryLookup in your bookmark toolbar and a new browser window opens up, with search results from the local library, showing whether the book is available. If it is you can log in to the library and request the book, quickly mitigating the temptation of a one click purchase.
LibraryLookup works by finding an ISBN number within a web page and using that to search the library’s collection. Which is great however as I’m not enrolled at university this year I have been using Auckland City Public library to quell my urges to purchase books. After a cursory g search returned naught for the Public Library I peeked and poked the necessary url gubbins into the librarylookup code. So here are the results, bookmarklets for the Auckland region libraries. Drag the relevant one into your bookmark toolbar. If you’re having problems with this check out this screencast from Jon.
For those that want details
As the Auckland, Manakau, Waitakere and North Shore city libraries all use ELGAR (e Libraries for a Greater Auckland Region) there is a single base url for all libraries. The parameter searchscope defines which library’s collection is searched and the associated skin in which the results are returned within. Here are the codes for the specific libraries.
1 = ELGAR overview
2 = Auckland
3 = Auckland Kids
4 = Manakau
5 = Manakau Kids
6 = North Shore
7 = North Shore Kids
8 = Rodney
9 = Rodney Kids
10 = Waitakere
11 = Waitakere Kids
Filed under: nz media tech
