Last week, I high­lighted Ed Vielmetti’s thoughts about adding cov­ers to the list of over­due books you have checked out, as well as the abil­ity to text the loca­tion of an item to your cell phone. Both of these are enhance­ments that I, as Patron 2.0, would very much appre­ci­ate my library providing.

In the com­ments on that post, Jason from the Iowa City Pub­lic Library gave us a work­ing exam­ple (work­ing in an Inno­v­a­tive cat­a­log, at least). I tried it out and sure enough, a few sec­onds after enter­ing my cell phone num­ber, up popped a text mes­sage with the loca­tion of the item.Very slick, and very useful.

Even bet­ter, Ed came back into the com­ments on that post and pointed at the script that runs this ser­vice. It was orig­i­nally writ­ten by Adam from Bryn Mawr more than a year ago, where it’s still in place today. Not only is it freely avail­able online, but there are very clear direc­tions for send­ing SMS from a III cat­a­log (thanks, Adam!).

If you have a pro­gram­mer on staff or some­one who knows just enough to be dan­ger­ous, now you, too, can imple­ment this ser­vice at no cost to your library to make your cat­a­log that much more useful.

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Orig­i­nally uploaded by ash966

Another great READ mini poster!