I'd be perfectly willing to host a "Virtual Card Catalog" on the stats pages for a distributed library.

Ideally, I would like to use the following format:

<!-- book-offered:ISBN -->
<!-- book-offered:ISBN -->
<!-- book-wanted:ISBN -->
<!-- book-wanted:ISBN -->

With one tag for each book offered, or wanted. I'm partial to using the ISBN, since it could be looked up, and titling of books would be consistent. All modern books have ISBNs, so I don't really see this as being a problem.

That being said, does anyone have any favorite ISBN reference sites that produce parsable HTML, XML, or text?

I would also considering proposing an optional third tag:

<!-- book-loaned:ISBN,user=[node_id] -->

that indicates who has which book. This would allow a potential borrower to /msg someone with a borrowed book and ask when they might be done with it. I recommend using the node_id of the borrower because too many users have funky characters in their names, or have trouble spelling them.

This is my "I went to bed at 2 AM, got up at 7:30 AM, gotten woken up 3 times during the 5.5 hour period for an ill dog, and I haven't had a complete cup of coffee yet" response. Any suggestions/modifications/additions/this_idea_sucks feedback would be welcome.

--Chris

e-mail jcwren

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