More URL options for venues

In advance of the new "Get it now" page, we're going to be moving library- and bookstore-related URLs into the LibraryThing Local venue system. We're also beefing up what sorts of URLs are available.

The result is a rather more daunting, but also more powerful, venue form:



The new options will, when filled in, allow us to link to sites outside of LibraryThing more effectively. You'll also notice a link to a venue's favicon, and another to it's Twitter name. Needless to say, we don't think everyone's going to know what those are.

Note: After I do a little cleaning, I'm going to dump the IndieBound data we have into the new fields.

What is MAGICNUMBER?

Okay, someone help me to explain this. I mean that, for example, the way to get an ISBN page on LibraryThing is to do...

http:// www.librarything.com/isbn/MAGICNUMBER

I think MAGICNUMBER is to replace the literal text that would be fed to the URI. eg If I wanted to find a particular ISBN on library thing you could type into the address bar of your browser

http:// www.librarything.com/isbn/9781400044511

without the space between http:// and the www.

and librarything would find it for you.

If you come across another site that lets you look for that ISBN like this

http:// www.somesite.com.au/etc/lib/Book Numbers/9781400044511

you would enter it in the above system as follows....

http:// www.somesite.com.au/etc/lib/Book Numbers/MAGICNUMBER

Hope I didn't just muddy the waters even more?

Does this mean that, if we've entered data for libraries into the old Buy/Borrow/Swap feature, we should re-enter it into the corresponding Local venues? Or will there be some sort of mapping done for venues that currently exist in both places?

Also, while this is great, I'm still concerned about the implied inability to use centralized sources like the Library of Congress or Worldcat to look up bibliographic data, if libraries are now going to be entirely moved into Local. Earlier you seemed to have come around to the "keep bibliographic data available" viewpoint, or at least willing to talk, so I'm just hoping to keep it on the radar screen.

To ensure that my guesses in #4 were right, I put info into Readings. I did the searches (which are the same for ISBN, Title etc) and the favicon.

Is that the way they should be done?

Note to others: I discovered that if you click on the favicon to the left of the address bar in Firefox (3.5.3) then click on More information" and "Media" you will often find the URI of the favicon.

Question about catalog URLs: In a big library system with multiple branches, often the catalog by default is for the whole library system. So, I'm looking at the case of the Los Angeles Public Library system. It's possible to restrict the search to only one particular branch, though. Should the catalog URL on Local be for the main catalog (i.e. the whole system) or restricted to the branch library, if possible?

PS, I'm not sure it even is possible to get a stable URL for the branch catalog only, in this case, but hypothetically...?

Also, while this is great, I'm still concerned about the implied inability to use centralized sources like the Library of Congress or Worldcat to look up bibliographic data, if libraries are now going to be entirely moved into Local. Earlier you seemed to have come around to the "keep bibliographic data available" viewpoint, or at least willing to talk, so I'm just hoping to keep it on the radar screen.

Yes, we're going to have multiple categories of links. If it's a real library or bookstore, it should have it's data entered there. Right now, we have libraries entered into Buy Borrow Swap, with no link to the local data. That's weird and loses us all sorts of value.

To ensure that my guesses in #4 were right, I put info into Readings. I did the searches (which are the same for ISBN, Title etc) and the favicon.

Right. Without checking the URLs, it looks you did everything right.

Note to others: I discovered that if you click on the favicon to the left of the address bar in Firefox (3.5.3) then click on More information" and "Media" you will often find the URI of the favicon.

Wow. Nice trick. I didn't know that. I had looked int he HTML, which is not, admittedly, something everyone can or will do.

So, does anyone have a better way to explain the MAGICNUMBER thing?

I think messages 3 and 4 explain MAGICNUMBER quite well.

> 4

Hope I didn't just muddy the waters even more?

Too muddy even for crawfish.

#9 Thanks
#10 McKinley Morganfield likes it that way!

> 11

But can he explain Magicnumber in a way that makes it understandable?

9: To some, perhaps :( I haven't a clue what it's talking about.

v

12 > "MAGICNUMBER" is just a placeholder. It gives LT an easy way to programmaticly identify where to place the ISBN, with out having to list ALL the different ISBN possibilities.

>14 readafew:
Now THAT explanation I can understand. (more or less)

I find it faintly hilarious that PortConMaine is the example given above. O_o

14> In that case something like "Use the text MAGICNUMBER in the place of the actual ISBN. You might also consider replacing MAGICNUMBER with something like ISBNGOESHERE.

17 > Ahhh! but the ISBN IS a magic number...

;)

>17 jjwilson61:.

MAGICNUMBER is also used as a replacement for Title and Keyword, though, which makes it more general purpose than something more ISBN-specific. Thus, LT coders only have to do a single grep, and then replace it with whatever the pertinent data is.

And, as we all know, letters, which will usually comprise Titles and Keywords, are, at the heart of computers, numbers as well (and, to boot, some ISBNs have X's in 'em). Thus, MAGICNUMBER is not a misnomer.

Well, it doesn't have to be a misnomer to be confusing and if you're surfacing the word to ordinary users then it ought to be clear.

But you seem to know a lot about the internals of LT, aethercowboy, are you employed by Tim, and if you are why don't you have an L next to your name?

>19 aethercowboy:

Now you've gone and casually thrown "grep" about. And they thought MAGICNUMBER was hard to explain to noncoders? ;)

Seriously, this sort of thing does need hint text, but having a good HelpThing page linked when it goes live would also help tremendously. Examples work wonders but they don't fit below the boxes in gray.

I grok grep, maybe that's why some people didn't understand #4?

>21 SchanleyMedia:/22.

I dream in regular expressions. I don't just drink 'em.

I probably would have been tempted to explain it like (in Perl):

$url =~ s/MAGICNUMBER/$isbn/g;

or something. Now, of course, this would only work for single ISBNs. It'd be more complex for multiple ISBNs and word sets (you'd have to add another s/\s+/+/g; to the mix for those!)

Maybe someone needs to HelpThing this, if not already done. And maybe someone who can speak to hoi polloi, and not just speak Geek.

I'm not a coder but the whole MAGICNUMBER thing made sense to me at the outset. It does what it says on the tin, doesn't it? Unless I'm getting it wrong. You just take the, for example, ISBN part out of the URL and replace it with the phrase 'MAGICNUMBER' (obviously without the apostrophes). Or am I being a bit of simpleton and misunderstanding completely? I speak no geek but it seems clear.

>24 klarusu:.

No, that's an accurate description.

For the "Multiple ISBNs?" field, would it be feasible to replace the drop-down list with a text box that could be used to specify an arbitrary separator? I know at least one library catalogue that can search for multiple ISBNs if they're separated by the word " OR ".

Give me one. I'll look into it. I suspect this method only works once a session has been inaugurated, but I'm game to hear otherwise.

Here's a search on the Oxford University Library Services catalogue using a collection of ISBNs from different editions of Twilight:

http://solo.ouls.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?fn=search&ct...

It's not a very pretty URL, but it does seem to work even if I start a new browser session.

Sorry, I can't seem to enter a long URL into a Talk post, but I've added the relevant URL (using MAGICNUMBER) to the venue page for the Bodleian Library.

Can you try putting it in

http://tinyurl.com/

and posting that?

Okay:

http://tinyurl.com/y8azrdj

Cool. Though annoyingly the URLs my local library uses are hideously ugly and more importantly longer than the librarything system allows.

Would a URL shortener work? or for that matter how long do url shortened urls stay around for?

Don't use a URL shortener. Shoot me your library's main homepage. It probably has a short form which our library people know.

For the front of the catalog, the URL is:

http://library.ncc.nsw.gov.au/uPortal/tag.idempotent.render.userLayoutRootNode.u...

Tim!

I decomposed the URL string for any given MARC record for Harris County, TX public libraries, which will list all branches and the availability of a given book, if you're looking for another set of libraries to integrate with.

http://newcatalog.hcpl.net/FullRecord.ashx?hreciid=%7clibrary%2fmarc%2fdynix-har...

Of course, replace MAGICNUMBER with the MARC number.

Unfortunately, I was unable to discover any way to break it down by branch, or to get DIRECTLY to a record via ISBN. :(

You can do this:

http://newcatalog.hcpl.net/?q=1598450239

but that gives you search results for the ISBN; it doesn't take you directly to that item. (By MARC number, aethercowboy means the accession number, which is going to be different for every library system, so we can't use it to link to stuff in a general way.)

>36 caseydurfee:.

Yeah, I added that to my local HCPL branch's venue (with the branch= option too!), 'cause that was the best I could do.

Thanks for breaking down MARCs for me. I thought they were some magic ISBN-parallel. Shows what I know about library science!