Have you ever seen a book on Amazon or another website and wondered whether your local library had a copy of it?
I have to admit as much as I like my library, Indianapolis Marion County Public Library. I do not care for the web interface with it’s URL session ids and timeouts and JavaScript linking! So I try to stay out of the website until I want the book. I saw LibraryLookup on 43 Folders. I tried LibraryLookup, but was annoyed with the ISBN interface. BookBurro looked promising but it only worked on 20-some library. I’m not a member of any of those libraries.
I decided to roll my own Firefox Search Plugin–which is very simple to do. You just have to know the query keywords for your library (such as isbn, keyword, title). The IMCPL is an IPAC system and uses “UTL” for its title keyword. Just drop this Firefox Search Plugin for IMCPL Title Browsing or this Firefox Search Plugin for IMCPL Keyword Search in your Firefox Search Plugins folder and restart Firefox. You will need Mozilla Firefox 2.0 or greater for this.
The Firefox Search Plugins folder for PC is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firfox\SearchPlugins
The Firefox Search Plugins folder for PC is for OS-X that’s /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/{user name}/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/{profile number}.default/searchplugins/
That’s all there is to it. Here are the few lines of the code for the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library for title browsing:
<search
name="IMCPL"
method="GET"
action="http://catalog.imcpl.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp"
queryCharset="utf-8">
<input name="term" user>
<input name="index" value="UTL">
<input name="spp" value="50">
</search>
This isn’t about Chrome, for me it’s really about using a second browser. A second browser to only use for web applications. Honestly, I admit I haven’t been using Google Chrome for months now. I’ve been using Safari. It is my understanding that Google’s Chrome browser uses WebKit as it’s rendering engine with the advantage of starting each window/tab in a separate process (which Internet Explorer 8b2 also does) to increase stability. The general idea is if your Google Docs crashes, then your Gmail doesn’t crash–just how desktop applications work. Your web applications are sand-boxed and protected from other web pages. Safari/WebKit/Chrome: What’s the difference? (more…)