Searching the AADL Catalog as Easy as Google, Delivery as Fast as Amazon

“There's an AADL catalog search plugin for Firefox, written by Matt Hampel. Matt is a regular at the a2b3 meetings and a student at Community High. It adds a very simple little search option to your Google search box so that you can keyword search the catalog from the corner of the screen.

The results are wonderful. In essence, it's just about as easy to search the AADL catalog as it is to search Google, and with a minimum number of clicks (not one-click yet) you can put a book on hold. If you like fairly obscure stuff this will often beat Amazon on delivery times, and certainly beats it hands-down on cost. (Of course you wait for books every so often, but if you keep enough in your queue you can treat the process kind of like Netflix.)” [Vacuum]

This is just one piece of “Library 2.0” – the ability to get your content (in this case, access to your content) out to where your users are instead of forcing them to come to your site to use your catalog with its oh-so-perfect-interface. And look what happens when you do it – easy as Google, faster than Amazon, leaps tall buildings in a single bound praise from patrons. You can also grab the code for the search plugin in order to create one for your own library. Now you really have no excuse for not having a FireFox search plugin!

Matt, the kid behind the plugin, also makes a couple of other interesting observations on his blog:

“I haven’t clicked an icon on my desktop in the last week. A sign of the changing Internet?”

“Hits from the search term ‘facebook high school’ (and all its variations) have nearly exceeded 3 months of hits for ‘Community High School’. You can feel the power of Facebook just churning below the surface.”