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“He tripped in front of her and she shoved him to keep from falling into him, and twisted her knee trying to recover,” said Prue Rosenthal, a library board member.

This reminded me of the first time I ever met Josie, as an AADL employee [years ago -- please note that I do not speak for the AADL in any official capacity].

It was August 2004, and the Great Blackout of the Eastern Seaboard had just started about an hour or two prior.  We had finally come to the realization that the power was not about to be restored and cleared the Northeast Branch of patrons [yeah, the branch in the Plymouth Road Mall - this was 2004].

The librarians were up front closing up for the day and I was in the back of the library tidying the computer area.  Josie entered through the rear [from the parking lot], saw me, and exclaimed — politely, but authoritatively — “WHO ARE YOU, AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY LIBRARY?”

Once we were properly introduced by other staff, she was nothing but sweet, but I’ve always known she had the eye of the tiger.

Feel better soon, Josie!  Now, who wants to hear a Fred Maxwell story?  [Again, I do not speak for the AADL.]

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!!! WARNING !!!
January 6, 2008 — This takes any 10 or 13 digit number and URLs it.  It broke my flickr links for a few days there.  So if you’re using this with QuickPost, maybe don’t use this.  I will work on a better solution in the coming days and weeks.

We now return you to the original pitch.  -B.
Ever wanted to blog about books, but not interested in giving any money to The Website That Sells Everything?

I work in a library and I want to encourage the borrowing of books through my library and others like it. I am not the only one. It will take a little time to develop or cobble together something that will serve as a versatile and media-rich alternative to the plugins that stick splashy ads for The World’s Biggest Bookstore all over your blog. I hope to explore that in 2008.

Today, though, I got all inspired by Banas’ adaptation of his favorite WP theme to include 2.0 widgets:

If you entertain fantasies of there lurking somewhere, somewhere, a theme, widget, or addon that will spontaneously uncork the fountain of wisdom you’ve been waiting to pour out onto the internet – well, please don’t stop fantasizing on my account – but the only thing that’s going to uncork that fountain is you.

And Banas was right. So I started small, by bastardizing Daniel Coe’s ISBN to Amazon Link WP plugin. Daniel’s well-formatted code made it rather simple to change the Amazon URL his script creates to a simple WorldCat link, like the one you see here to my favorite book, Nick Hornby’s “About a Boy”: 0575061596.

It will do this with any 10 or 13-digit number. That means if you put a ten digit [i.e. US or Canadian] phone number in a blog post, it will turn it into a WorldCat link unless you put the area code in (parentheses) or something. It also means that if leading zeroes cause the number to be other than 10 or 13 digits it will probably be hosed, so count the digits.

Unfortunately, right now, this only makes links to WorldCat, a database of OCLC member libraries. WorldCat, by its membership nature, doesn’t index all the world’s libraries, but it’s a start. You could print the resulting page and take it to your local library, where a staff member will glean the knowledge they need to get the book to you.

Thanks, Daniel, for making your plugin available under the GPL.

Download it here: WorldCat Wordpress Plugin [16K ZIP file, should work OK with OneClick Install]

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