Library

Suppose you're shopping on Amazon for a book like Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, and you wonder if your local library has a copy of the book. Amazon displays the ISBN near the title or product details. The catalog for the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium supports lookup by ISBN. If you perform the search, you'll notice that the resulting URL for that search is

http://newburyport.mvlc.org/eg/opac/record/888792?contains=contains;_special=1;qtype=identifier%7Cisbn;query=978-1594200069;locg=1

Making this generic, you can change the string record/888792 to results and put any ISBN after the query= part and get the lookup results immediately. Taking it a step further, you can create a JavaScript bookmarklet that can be saved to your browser linkbar which allows you to simply highlight the ISBN on any webpage and instantly search your local library for the book. This is what the JavaScript code looks like:

javascript: (function () {
    // first we get the selection; or do it the Microsoft way
    var t = window.getSelection ? window.getSelection().toString() : document.selection.createRange().text;
    // create a Regular Expression to test the validity of our input
    var re = /[\s\-xX0-9]{10,17}/;
    var OK = re.exec(t);
    if (!OK) {
      // Notify the user if their selection doesn't look right
      alert(t + ' is not a valid ISBN\n Please just select a 10 or 13 digit ISBN\ndashes and spaces are OK');
    } else {
      // clean up by removing dashes and spaces
      t = t.replace(/[\-\s]/,'');
      // hand off to MLVC search
      window.location = 'http://newburyport.mvlc.org/eg/opac/results?contains=contains;_special=1;qtype=identifier%7Cisbn;locg=1;pane=numeric;query=' + t;
    }
})()

Note: for the bookmarklet to work, it all has to be on one line. The code above is presented on several lines for readability.

Want this bookmarklet? Drag this link to your browser bookmark bar: Search MLVC

Try it

This bookmarklet works only when you have selected a valid numeric ISBN (dashes and spaces are OK)

Select ONLY the numeric portion of an ISBN. Do not include the letters "ISBN"

• Little Rabbit Foo Foo is ISBN 0671709682
• Free Culture is ISBN 1594200068

If you want to customize the location of the search, you must change the locg parameter. locg=1 searches across all the MLVC rather than a specific library to cast the widest net - and of course you can always ask for the material to be loaned to your local library.

International Standard Book Number = 10-digit or 13-digit codes used by the publishing industry to uniquely identify individual book titles and editions. Some 10-digit ISBNs may end with an "X" instead of a digit.

Uniform Resource Locator = an address of a web page or other component, including the protocol.