Richard Wallis over at Talis has put together a Firefox extension called LibraryThingThing. In fact, it should have been called LibraryThingLibraryThing because it fancies up LibraryThing pages with library information, namely the number of libraries that have the book, drawing on the Talis Platform Holdings Lookup Service. If you click on the “Found in X Libraries” link, you get a list of those libraries, with links to their page.

LibraryThingThing is a complex three-API Greasemonkey mashup, querying the Holding Lookup Service along with LibraryThing’s thingISBN and OCLC’s xISBN service. It makes my head spin a bit. Three cheers for Richard. Too bad he works for Talis, or he might have won the Mashing Up the Library Contest.

LibraryThingThing can be found at: http://www.talis.com/tdn/greasemonkey/librarythingthing

This is an exceedingly cool mashup, and a very good demonstration of all the components. To my mind, it would be more useful if it did less, telling you only if the book was in your library. Do you agree? How should LibraryThing tie into libraries. As always, your thoughts are much appreciated.

We were, actually, planning on doing something like this, and even started the code. When we bring something live it will be a lot less technically elegant—good old server-side programming—but also not browser- and extension-dependent.

In other news, Chris just came by to grab the ginormous server box. Abby took a picture of it, but her camera uses some arcane memory stick format, and she forgot the cable is too modern for Tim. We have photographic proof of a new server—really!

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