Requesting books from a local library

Hi all,

I am trying to find a way to quickly find and request books from my local libraries.

I maintain a list of books I would like to read in Zotero. I belong to 3 public libraries and 1 university library; some of the libraries are easier to get to than others. Does anybody have a workflow that would simplify requesting books? The perfect workflow would have me view a book in Zotero, click a button, and be directed to the request page for my most preferred library that had the book. Even better would be if I could select a number of books and do this all at once. Sadly, the public libraries are not members of Worldcat, or this might be easier.

Book Burro seems to do something like this, but it also seems to be a moribund project. It still works in my Firefox version and I was able to add a public library to it. So far this seems to be the best option, but I’m a bit bothered that it only works on amazon pages, and takes a bit more time than I’d like.

Any help that others can provide would be much appreciated. Thanks!

best, Erik
  • Sadly, the public libraries are not members of Worldcat, or this might be easier.
    Right, this is basically what the Library Lookup feature is for. If there was an OpenURL resolver that did cover your local libraries, you could enter that instead in the Zotero preferences.

    If not, and you were feeling particularly enterprising, you could probably write a small web service that accepted an OpenURL request, searched your local libraries' sites for the books, and presented a list.

    Alternatively, you could create custom Lookup Engines for your local libraries' catalogs. I don't know off-hand how much flexibility those engines have (e.g., whether they can just search by title).
  • Thanks, Dan! I had no idea that lookup engines were pluggable like that. I was able to create a lookup engine for the Oakland Public Library which looks up books by ISBN. I notice that I can do this for multiple items as well, which is wonderful!

    Is there a place where Zotero could host lookup engines? Book Burro came with a large collection of templates for local public libraries which could pretty easily be translated into OpenSearch definitions. I could generate a huge number of these for Zotero if there were a place to host them.
  • Oh, great — glad that worked.
    Is there a place where Zotero could host lookup engines?
    That's an interesting question. Want to start a zotero-dev thread about this, and we can talk about various possibilities?
  • Hi Dan,

    Sure, I'll post to zotero-dev. Thanks again.
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