If Firefox is your browser of choice and you do regular searches for books and articles, check out the new LibX toolbar from the Jefferson Library. There’s a version for Microsoft IE users as well.
“What’s LibX?” you ask?
Well, LibX is a browser extension that makes it easy to run various kind of searches in various bibliographic databases without having to leave your current browser window. By installing this extension, you get a LibX toolbar with databases we think are most useful for our researchers. The Jefferson Library edition includes customized bookmarklets to the Thomas Jefferson Portal online catalog, WorldCat.org, Google Books, Open Library, Internet Archive, JSTOR, Google Scholar, Bookfinder, Amazon, the Library of Congress’ American Memory, Monticello, and the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia.
This latest update includes title, author, subject and ISBN searches in the Open Library, the bibliographic resource from the folks at the Internet Archive that now provides access to full-text scans of over a million books. Also new in this latest version is a connection to the rare book metasearch engine, viaLibri.
LibX is particularly useful when running the same search in multiple sources. You can run composite searches involving multiple terms. Just by clicking on the down arrow next to the search box, you can add as many search boxes as you require.
You can also grab any title, author or ISBN on the webpage and drop it over the database selection next to the search box and run a search automatically, without having to leave the webpage you’re on — sweet!
If you’re shopping for a book in Amazon and you’d rather save a few bucks, you can click on the little Jefferson icon that appears next to the title to see if the Jefferson Library already owns the book!
LibX is an open source application created by Annette Bailey and Godmar Back from Virginia Tech.
