Following from my simple Inter-Library Loan Request Form for Prince Edward Island, I created a JavaScript “bookmarklet,” modelled on LibraryLookup by Jon Udell, that lets you link directly from an Amazon.com (or Amazon.ca or, indeed, any of the book-related websites supported by LibraryLookup) book details page to a PEI Inter-Library Loan Request form, pre-filled in for that item.
You can use this in conjuction with the LibraryLookup tool for the Provincial Library Service Catalogue to order books by Inter-Library Loan that aren’t available locally.
Here’s the bookmarklet: ISBNtoILL.
Drag that link onto your browser’s toolbar. Then whenever you’re using Amazon.com, or another book-related website where the ISBN is in the current URL, click the link to load an Inter-Library Loan request form.
This system works by taking the ISBN from the URL (using the mechanism from LibraryLookup), passing the ISBN to Amazon.com using their SOAP API to get the author, title, publisher and date details, and then simply creating a regular HTML web form pre-filled with this information. When the form is submitted, the actual processing of the ILL request is done by the Provincial Library Service’s server.
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Comments
Very cool, Peter, the SOAP
Very cool, Peter, the SOAP link to Amazon is brilliant! We are trying to roll out a variation of LibraryLookup for the Fall and I have been looking for some ideas on how best to wire in Interlibrary Loan.
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