Mashing thingISBN and library lookup using yahoo pipes courtesy of Mashed libraries 2008
I attended the Mashed libraries event organised by Owen Stephens and UKOLN on Thursday 27th. See Owen’s blog for an overview of the day. I am not a techie but I do love to mess around with software so I was expecting to be an interested observer rather than do any mashing myself. However the event was so good that even a tinkerer like me was able to put something useful together as a result.
Tony Hirst demonstrated how to use Yahoo Pipes to do a number of useful things. One of the things Tony showed was how to use LibraryThing’s ThingISBN api to look up alternative editions of a book using the ISBN. Tony goes into detail about this pipe on his blog.
I am a regular user of my local public library but the opac search experience is truly horrible; clunky, slow and restrictive. The fastest and most reliable way to search is by ISBN. However the problem with ISBN searching is that the opac covers 9 boroughs so there are bound to be alternative versions of most books and the opac is not clever enough to be able to detect this so I have to augment ISBN searches with painful title or author searches. ThereforeTony’s pipe offered a possible solution to my problem.
Tony’s pipe was designed to link the results for all the alternative ISBNs to Amazon so it was simple to tweak it to display links to my local library instead. My version of Tony’s pipe can be seen on my yahoo pipes page.
However it would be a bit of a pain to have to go to yahoo pipes every time I wanted to look up alternative ISBNs for a book so I tried to think of ways to make it more convenient. My first instinct was to try and make a netvibes widget that I could use to search for alternative ISBNs. However making a widget that accepted variable input in the ISBN field proved beyond me. Just as I was about to give up I thought of a different way.
I already use Jon Udell’s library lookup bookmarklet to scrape ISBNs from Amazon pages and search for them in my local library catalogue. Perhaps it was possible to use this with the pipe?
It was not only possible but incredibly simple. You can select the pipe to output alternative ISBNs in an RSS feed. When you do this, you get the following url: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6c6dc73754946fa278bbc1f76cddc469&_render=rss&isbn=0099469693
All I had to do was plug this url (minus the isbn number at the end) into the library lookup bookmarklet generator, choose Innovative from the vendor list, click the build button and drag the result to your browser toolbar. Now I have a bookmarklet that can scrape an ISBN from an Amazon record and look up all alternative versions of the book on my local library opac.
It is not perfect, it is ugly and it does not distinguish between ISBNs for books that the library holds and those that it does not. However, it is something that I will use on an almost daily basis and I am unreasonably pleased with myself. Thanks Tony, Owen and Mashed Libraries.
I find events like Mashed libraries incredibly useful and I always come away buzzing with ideas. JISC will be putting on an event for developers early next year. Look out for more news on this on the event blog at http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org
***Update***Thanks to Owen’s prompting on Twitter, I have now modified the pipe so that it only displays links to editions of the book that the library holds. This uses the content of the h1 tags on the opac pages to judge whether a book is held or a null result is returned and then filters out the null results. It is a rather inelegant solution and is very specific to the opac of my local public library but I imagine could be generalised if you were willing to mess about with it.
Comments
2 Responses to “Mashing thingISBN and library lookup using yahoo pipes courtesy of Mashed libraries 2008”
Leave a Reply
[…] McGregor of JISC has already written up his experience of this , as has Jo Alcock - I think these posts describes representative experiences of the […]
[…] Andy McGregor […]