phil ringnalda

I don’t actually have anything against linking to Amazon while talking about a book, but it’s not always exactly what I want. If other people want to try to get a few cents as an Associate, that’s fine by me, but the totals I’ve heard people talking about don’t make it sound like it’s really worth it, and for some books (brand new novels that are sort of okay, out of print books where there are only a few used copies for sale at Amazon, so the profiteers have them priced at $50 when $5 would be closer to real market price) it’s absolutely not what I want to do. What I really want to do then is link to the book in a library catalog.

But even in the increasingly less-rare case where it’s possible to link directly to an item in a library catalog, there’s still the question of which catalog: mine? yours? how would I know which is yours? If you know your way around libraries, you probably know the answer: WorldCat, the union catalog of some 12,000 OCLC member libraries, currently containing a smidge over 54 million records. You might even have heard about the Open WorldCat pilot, which made results, formerly restricted to libraries only, available through partners like Abebooks: search for a book that isn’t for sale through any Abebooks seller, and you get a link to see if you can find it in a nearby library. What you probably haven’t seen, unless you’re in the habit of googling for book titles, is that you can now find WorldCat results (currently for 399,000 records out of the Open WorldCat pilot database of 2 million records) in Google, getting links that don’t require a referral from a partner bookseller.

If I get you all excited about David James Duncan’s My Story As Told By Water, and you live in San Francisco, when you follow that link and put in your zip code as 94102, you’ll get a list of California libraries that own it, and in the case of SFPL, which has a cooperative, RESTian catalog, you’ll get a link directly to that book in the catalog: four copies on the shelf at the moment. Going through Noe Valley? There’s a copy in the branch there.

Of course, with less than half a million records indexed by Google so far, the odds aren’t exactly in your favor, so it better be really easy to check, or you won’t even consider it. Thanks to Jon Udell, it is: I snagged the guts out of his Library Lookup bookmarklet, which will look up books in your local library while you are looking at the page for the book at Amazon (or anywhere else that puts the ISBN in the page URL), and turned it into a bookmarklet for WorldCat Lookup. Drag that to your links bar/bookmarks toolbar, click it while you’re at Amazon looking up the book anyway, and if Google knows about the WorldCat record, you’re set. Or, if you want to search directly, bookmark this WorldCat Google Quicksearch link in Firefox, then in the bookmark properties add a Keyword, something like wc, and then wc david james duncan in the address bar will search for him with site:worldcatlibraries.org tacked on to restrict it to just Open WorldCat results.