Here’s a simple tip for managing your library lists: try Amazon Wishlists. If you’re a researcher or a heavy reader, you know the problem with your library lists: they grow constantly, they spread out over multiple post-its/notebooks, you lose them, and when you actually get to the library you can’t find them.
Amazon Wishlists solves this problem – you keep a single list, which is always accessible, and you get the value-add of Amazon’s recommendations. It is Amazon’s recommendations that make this sustainable for me: it is extra work to look up books in Amazon and add them to my wish list, but the product page is so rich with information that I often find one or two other interesting books. This is virtual equivalent of stacks-browsing you just don’t get in most OPAC’s.
A couple of quick notes: If you already use wish lists for your actual wishes, you will want to create a separate list. I named mine “Reading List” and include a warning that I don’t want these books purchased for me by some kind soul. If you don’t do this, you may find an obscure $200 stats book under the Christmas tree instead of the iPod Touch. You can also make your list private, which solves the problem. To simplify the Amazon-to-OPAC lookup, I’ve created a bookmarklet that does an OPAC lookup from the Amazon product page. My bookmarklet is configured for UNC but if you want to hack it for your school, feel free.
Note: For the times you actually have to buy books, I’ve been working on some software that profiles your wish list and predicts the best time for you to buy a book (based on historical pricing data). Watch this space for more details.
Tags: amazon, bookmarklets, libraries
A very useful Firefox extension I use is called Book Burro. For a book you’re viewing on Amazon, it will search various sites such as Powell’s or Half or Amazon’s resellers to find prices for the currently displayed book.
But Book Burro also hooks in to the OCLC WorldCat. Feed in your zip code, and it will tell you if the displayed book is in your local public or college libraries. Neat trick.
[...] up a chapter or section from a book (even if that book is on the shelf in the other room). Since I manage my reading lists with Amazon, I wanted to make it very easy to look up books in Google Booksearch from Amazon. So I created the [...]
You can do pretty much the same thing with lists at WorldCat.org, with the added advantage that (assuming your library is a member of OCLC), you can quickly see whether your library has a given book or not. The page for a book has direct links to Amazon, Google Books and your local library (if it has the book). This last means that you can click through in order to check availability or request the book — no bookmarklet necessary.
For each book, there are a number of additional tabs, including tags, reviews from WorldCat users and from Amazon, and a “people who read this also read” list.
Once you create a user account at WorldCat.org, you can create any number of lists and make them public or private. You can add notes to the books in your lists. You can subscribe to other people’s lists.
For each book, you can see how many users have added it to their lists, and go to those lists to browse other possibly related books.
Perhaps it’s now superfluous, but I should add that I really like WorldCat book lists. You can see my lists at http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/lagbolt
Thanks for the tip!