Related Links
Linking to Booksellers from Libraries Australia
Libraries Australia is a vast catalogue of over 42 million books, journals, newspapers, pictures, maps and much more located in over 800 Australian libraries. It also contains information on all books published in Australia, written by Australians or about Australia. It is:
- Easy to use
- Borrow or get a copy through your library or other libraries
- Links to the full set of Australian booksellers at the Australian Booksellers Association's Find a Bookshop service, either to their website, or via a direct search of their database
Do you want a link to your bookshop from Libraries Australia?
In order to implement this function we need to be able to search the bookshop using a "web services" API (Application Programming Interface). In particular, we would like to be able to construct a URL which will search the bookshop database using either an ISBN or author/title query and have the search results returned in XML. The returned XML document would need to contain a list of matching records with each record having the title of the item and the URL to the item in separate XML fields. Using such an API, we can configure Libraries Australia so that it links directly to the page describing the item on your web site.
For bookshops interested in implementing this function please send us the following information:
- The name of the software, its version number and the supporting vendor's name.
- The URL to your catalogue.
- An example ISBN search URL, ISSN search URL and an author/title search URL. eg: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?SAB1=&BOOL1=all+of+these&FLD1=ISBN%20(ISBN)&DB=local&CNT=25.
For bookshops that don't currently support such an interface, the Libraries Australia Search service may simply link to the home page of the online bookshop.
If you require further information or wish to have a link set up to your bookshop, please contact us.

