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August 25, 2006
WorldCat Firefox Search Extension
WorldCat, in simple terms, allows you to do a search for a book across thousands of libraries. Even better is if you want to find a book in your area. Do a search on WorldCat and it will tell you the closest libraries that have that particular book. Part of my Amazon.com book searching routine is now to check WorldCat to see if there's a library close by that has it.
There's still the lingering problem that Amazon.com is much better at getting their customers to the book they want than traditional library search engines. Why is that?
I was excited when Google started adding in links to WorldCat from their Scholar search results and found myself trying to trick Google into returning the right result so I could get a WorldCat link for a book search. Now it is much easier to do a WorldCat search if you use Firefox.
Installation is just like any other Firefox Search plug-in.
A set of search results and a city location is all you need to find out if your local library has a copy.
Stu Weibel points out that OCLC has also released code snippets for web sites to include WorldCat searches from their site.
Posted by michael at August 25, 2006 04:50 AM