Google Toolbar Autolink and other Search Plugins
It has been vilified as spyware, but the Google Toolbar's Autolink feature is tantalizingly close to enabling a type of functionality I'm very anxious for: the ability to select book information (ISBN, mainly) on a page and link it to an ISBN search in the library catalog.
This goes far beyond linking bookseller catalog pages (which contain ISBNs) to the library catalog. I'm anxious because we have a web-based SQL report generator (Microstrategy) pointed at our ILS that can create all sorts of custom reports with title/ISBN information as web pages; but to be effective for public use, those reports need links to the catalog.
I've looked at the Mozilla Google Toolbar and the Firefox search plug-in, but they don't scan page content. Frustratingly, Google hasn't made Autolink's ISBN lookup customizable--it's locked in to an Amazon search. What I'm thinking of maybe already has been done or could be done with Greasemonkey, and I've just been too far out of the loop.
Since posting this entry, Google has added Booksense, Barnes & Noble, and Froogle as well as Amazon to the ISBN Autolink feature of their toolbar. OCLC has developed their own hack for Autolink that adds that capability:
http://www.oclc.org/worldcatdownloads/#top
And a private company has developed exactly what I was looking fo:
Albion Booklink:
http://www.albionresearch.com/booklink/
However, Booklink is only for IE; and doesn't work within certain plug-in or Java-generated web environments, i.e. it doesn't work with my ILS's web-based report generator (Microstrategy) or inPDF documents.