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