LibX Edition now live

The Pierce Library edition of the LibX plugin for Firefox and IE is live as of today. LibX is kind of a Swiss army knife that supports all kinds of library features from catalogs to proxies to link resolvers. LibX editions are custom versions configured to use the catalogs, proxies, and link resolvers that belong to a particular library.
Here are some of my favorite LibX features:

• A toolbar that lets you search your library's catalog(s) directly. We actually use three catalogs: our own holdings; the Summit catalog, which covers the Orbis-Cascade Alliance of academic libraries in Oregon and Washington; and the Sage catalog, with holdings from public and school libraries in Eastern Oregon. The LibX toolbar makes it handy to run a search on any of these, and if you don't get results you can quickly run the same search on a different catalog.
• Context menu searching. With LibX installed, you can select text on a page and right mouse to use the selected text as an author, title, or keyword search against the main library catalog. LibX will recognize ISBN/ISSNs and allow you to search for those. And it will recognize DOIs and let you search your OpenURL resolver for the full text. All these features save navigation time and typing.
• ISBN recognition and cuing. LibX recognizes ISBNs on many book-related web sites and inserts a custom icon that links to an ISBN search of the main catalog. If you're looking at a book on Amazon, it will remind you to check the library catalog. It also supports OCLC's xISBN service to search on "associated" ISBNs, such as different editions of the same title.
• Proxy support. LibX can be configured with information about your library's remote access proxy. (Both ezproxy and Web Access Management are supported.) Occasionally, you might find yourself at a paywall for subscription content, for example, if you found an article through a web search. You could just note the citation data, then go back to the library web site and search databases and/or link resolvers to see whether the library has access. But with LibX, you can quickly right mouse and reload the page through the proxy, and if the library subscribes to the resource you'll have immediate access.

Make your own LibX edition

Hundreds of libraries have already created their own LibX editions using the LibX edition builder. It's a fair amount of information to enter, but it should be pretty straightforward, and every option has a popup help screen. Two tips:

• You'll need a small logo for your edition/cue icon. The easiest way to get one is to reuse a favicon from your library (or university) web site. You can use MS Paint to convert from ICO to gif format if necessary.
• xISBN setup was a little finicky for our Millenium catalog, since it needs to have a search scope specified and the OCLC documentation linked from the edition builder is out of date. What finally worked was to leave the first two LibraryLookup options blank and set "OCLC xISBN LibraryLookup Service OPAC site parameters" to "&searchscope=N", leaving out the quotes and substituting the scope number for N.

What next?

We're not planning any immediate campaign to get people to use this, but I am putting it on all the PCs in the library computer lab. And I surreptitiously installed it on a couple of staff PCs to make some of our library faculty live with it. If we get any feedback, I'll tweak some of the settings until we have a good "release candidate," then post info on our web site about what it's good for and how to use it. If enough people find it useful, then we'll get more proactive about promoting LibX, possibly along with other library-related plugins such as Zotero.