Searching the AADL catalog as easy as Google, delivery as fast as Amazon

I was talking with Jenny Levine tonight and mentioned this which I thought more people knew about. (But repetition is the very soul of the net, so I'll say it again).

There's an AADL catalog search plugin for Firefox, written by Matt Hampel. Matt is a regular at the a2b3 meetings and a student at Community High. It adds a very simple little search option to your Google search box so that you can keyword search the catalog from the corner of the screen.

The results are wonderful. In essence, it's just about as easy to search the AADL catalog as it is to search Google, and with a minimum number of clicks (not one-click yet) you can put a book on hold. If you like fairly obscure stuff this will often beat Amazon on delivery times, and certainly beats it hands-down on cost. (Of course you wait for books every so often, but if you keep enough in your queue you can treat the process kind of like Netflix.)

We're at the library regularly every Sunday when it opens, and it's wonderful to always have a fresh supply of books to wait for.

UPDATE:

Bob Kuehne has details on searching on the Mac with Safari and Inquisition. (Looks even easier).

Technorati Tags: annarbor, books, catalog, library, library2.0, opac, search

Comments

[Matt Hampel]

Cool! I'm glad that the plugin is being used.

Would media-specific AADL plugins be useful? Often I'm just searching for a DVD or book. I haven't looked to closely at the URL structure but it's probably possible.