(jcwren) Re: Virtual Distributed Library

I'd be perfectly willing to host a "Virtual Card Catalog" on the stats pages for a distributed library.

Ideally, I would like to use the following format:

With one tag for each book offered, or wanted. I'm partial to using the ISBN, since it could be looked up, and titling of books would be consistent. All modern books have ISBNs, so I don't really see this as being a problem.

That being said, does anyone have any favorite ISBN reference sites that produce parsable HTML, XML, or text?

I would also considering proposing an optional third tag:

that indicates who has which book. This would allow a potential borrower to /msg someone with a borrowed book and ask when they might be done with it. I recommend using the node_id of the borrower because too many users have funky characters in their names, or have trouble spelling them.

This is my "I went to bed at 2 AM, got up at 7:30 AM, gotten woken up 3 times during the 5.5 hour period for an ill dog, and I haven't had a complete cup of coffee yet" response. Any suggestions/modifications/additions/this_idea_sucks feedback would be welcome.

--Chris

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Re: (jcwren) Re: Virtual Distributed Library
by mirod (Canon) on Feb 23, 2001 at 19:05 UTC

Actually I think we don't need a DB but just a table somewhere on the site with the list of books available. At least until we have so many books available that we need a DB to list them.

Plus I think each book in the Book Reviews section lists the ISBN, so you can probably get it from vroom.

If you really want an ISBN search I found there a search thingie that retrieves the title for a given ISBN, It found the Camel 3, but then the tool went down before I had a chance to test it further :--( I'll keep you posted on whether it also works for less common titles as soon as it comes back).

Update: the store seems to have a good collection, they had the Camel 3, Web Client Programming with Perl, the MySQL book by Paul Dubois and the XSLT book. They just missed a Unicode book that's about the most arcane book I own.

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