John Blyberg's latest nifty catalog update at the Ann Arbor District Library adds links to Google Book Search when that service has images available for the book. He writes:
So the folks over at Google Books think they can go ahead and incorporate our catalogs into their search, do they?
Actually, that’s fine, I have no problem with that, which means… They should have no problem with me incorporating Google Books into our hit-list. Right?
Now when users search the AADL catalog, they will be given the option to peek inside the books on the hit-list–that is, if there is a record over at Google Books. Basically, the first time that record is displayed in the list, the middleware queries Google Books to see if it has that item in its database. If it does, the middleware makes note of that in a MySQL table so that the remote query doesn’t need to be run again. That way, future queries save time and bandwidth.
Nifty! And handy too, especially since GBS doesn't have subject-based searching.
Comments