MeLCat is the Michigan statewide library interlibrary loan network. From the ASDAL newsletter
At the very first MeLCat user's meeting there was a comparison made between the costs of traditional inter-library loan and this new delivery system. Traditional ILL costs between $17 and $30 dollars per item, with deliver time of up to two weeks; while MeLCat costs are between $1 to $5 dollars per item, with delivery times of one to three days. Pretty fantastic!
Indeed, with borrowing rights now at research and public libraries across the state, there's hardly ever a book I might want to look at that isn't somewhere a few days away. The trick then is finding it before you give up on your search, and for that I turned to Jon Udell's Library Lookup project. A few tweaks to my older Ann Arbor District Library lookup script created a new MeLCaT Amazon Linky (Greasemonkey needed) which embeds search results in your Amazon pages.
Thanks to superpatron Jon Udell for the original insight that led to this, and to Pittsburgh area blogger "Inner Bitch" who was the proximate cause for me revisiting this in her "Taking a can opener to Amazon" post.
The next natural step is to revisit the Google Books library lookup script I did for Google and Ann Arbor and mash that around again so it hits the whole state - I hope to have that ready in time for when Google's Ben Bunnell visits the Ann Arbor District Library on November 30 2006 (see upcoming.org for details).
UPDATE: Google Books MeLCaT library lookup just updated.
Technorati Tags: amazon, google, judell, librarylookup
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