Since the comments feed for my blog is totally separate from the main RSS feeds, I wanted to highlight the great resources that came out of the Native Firefox Search of Your Library's Catalog! post. This is a relatively easy feature to offer your patrons, especially if you’re a Sirsi or Innovative library.

• Have a look at Kenton Good’s Firefox Search Plugins, which search the library’s catalog, the library’s web site, and a basic SFX title search.
• Science Library Pad has a whole category devoted to Firefox Extensions that highlights library tools.
• Corey Seeman’s Firefox Plugin for Innovative Libraries (thanks, Michael!), which will probably be the basis for what I hope will be a SWAN Firefox search plugin!
• Mark Swenson wrote up great instructions for How to Create a Firefox Search Plugin for SIRSI.
• All of which led to my home – Sirsi – library creating a Search Extension for their catalog (look under the search box on the lefthand side). Yay, Brian (who was actually already working on this)!
• John Wohlers also did some nice work on this, but I’m waiting to point to something else very cool he has done. Tease. :-P

Update: O’Reilly’s WindowsDevCenter also has an excerpt from the book Windows XP Hacks that also explains how to make a Firefox search plugin.

Funny Foxtrot comic strip today about Wikipedia. [via my good friend Deanna]

Not so funny story about Wikipedia: for last week’s NEASIST presentation, I illustrated some ways WorldCat could be integrated into various online, non-library resources, one of which was Wikipedia. As an example, I edited the entry for The Da Vinci Code and under External Links, I added “Find libraries near you that own The Da Vinci Code” (snapshot).

Seventeen minutes later (that’s 1–7 minutes later), Violetriga removed my link, citing the very vague reason “ ‘find a library’ link isn’t a good way forward.”

WTF? Needless to say, I was beyond irked. It’s one thing to remove the link; it’s another to say it isn’t “a good way forward.” It isn’t a good way forward for whom? To where? And why not? I needed answers. So I found Violetriga’s user page on Wikipedia and left the most innocuous comment I was able to bring myself to type (version 34): “I added the link to find ‘The Da Vinci Code’ in libraries, and I’m just hoping for a more detailed explanation for why you removed it. TIA.”

I waited 17 minutes, then 18, 20, 30, 60, and then it turned into days. Violetriga answered other people’s questions, but not mine. To this day, she still hasn’t answered it. Which is probably for the best, because when I showed all of this at the NEASIST event, there was a room full of pretty ticked off librarians, all angry at one Violetriga. Even though she does good work for Wikipedia, I guess we’ll never know why the library link isn’t a good way forward. Not so funny.