WorldCat has been doing lots of great things lately to allow it’s users (that’s us, library people) to use their data. The WorldCat API is a great thing to investigate because it gives you lots of control over the bibliographic data that gets displayed. It also takes some time and programming skills to make good use of it though.
For those looking for a simpler solution, WorldCat has a few simple Widgets that can easily be embedded in a web page. In this post, we’ll look at WorldCat’s list widget as a way to quickly and easily display a collection of books (and possibly other materials) on a web page.
First things first. You need a WorldCat account. You already have one, right? If not, create one here (and shame on you!).
Creating lists in WorldCat
After you have an account and have logged in at worldcat.org, you have everything you need to start creating a list other than the list itself. Here’s what to do next:
- Decide what you want to make a list of.
- Search for things related to that topic. (I’m going to make a list of books about APIs).
- Click to view the record for an item you want to add to your list.
- Above the item title, you’ll notice a small link that says “Add to list”. Click it.
- In the pop-up box, you can either create a new list or use an existing list. (I’m creating a new list call ‘API books’.)
- If you’re creating a new list, you’ll have to repeat steps 4 and 5 and choose the list you’ve just created.
- If you’re successful, you’ll see a confirmation message at the top of the screen.
- Repeat steps 2 through 6 until you have added everything you want.
The list widget: first steps
Now you’re ready to turn your list into a widget! You need one important piece of information about your list before we can do this though: the list id.
- Choose ‘My Lists’ from the ‘My WorldCat’ menu
- Select the list that you wish to use
- Note the number at the end of the URL for your list
- This number is your list id
- My lists URL is http://www.worldcat.org/profiles/mulcahey99/lists/1386546, so my list id is 1386546
- Jot this down somewhere where you can find it again
The list widget: finally!
Okay. Now we’re ready to finally make our widget.
- Start by heading to the widgets section of worldcat.org.
- Choose ‘WorldCat list widget’. (At some point, be sure to check out the other widgets and tools WorldCat offers.)
- Copy and paste the provided code into your web page using your favorite HTML editor.
- Replace the part of the code that says **listId** with your list’s ID.
- View the beautiful results! http://pages.towson.edu/ddahl/worldcatwidget.html
That’s it!
Any additional items you decide to add to your list will automatically (magically?) show up in your WorldCat List widget.
Use it to add some dynamic content and interactivity to your research guides, post it on your personal site to let people know what you’re reading, or help a faculty member create a list of suggested readings for a course.
Addendum: WorldCat Local
If you’re lucky enough to have WorldCat Local at your institution, you can insert this information and direct users to your WorldCat Local implementation rather than the general WorldCat.org. You’ll need to add this to the URL in the <script> tag.
For instance, at Towson, our WorldCat Local URL is www.towsonuniversity.worldcat.org. So, in my URL, I need to add &myLocal=towsonuniversity.
The resulting code would look like this:
<script language="javascript" src="http://www.worldcat.org/widgets?lookAndFeel=listSmall&ai=Towson_mulcahey99&widgetId=WorldCatListWidget&listId=1386546&myLocal=towsonuniversity"></script>
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: widget, WorldCat | 2 Comments »











As budget belts keep tightening, we find ourselves scavenging for free software options. I’d like to introduce one such option –
With ScreenHunter you have choices. You can capture your full-screen OR you can drag your mouse to select an area for capture. The selected area can be any size. However, it must be rectangular. You can also choose whether or not you would like the mouse pointer to appear within the captured image. If you want to select a rectangular area for capture AND include the mouse pointer in the selected image, you will need to use the hotkey option. Place your mouse pointer where you want it to appear on the screen and hit the hotkey (F6). The pointer will stay where you left it and your mouse will be transformed into a ScreenHunter selection tool. Capture What, Mouse, and Hotkey settings are all found under the “From” settings.
Under the “To” settings you can designate where screen captures should save to, what file format they should be saved in, and how the new files should be named. You can designate screen captures to save to the clipboard and/or to a particular folder, such as your desktop. ScreenHunter will save screen captures as JPEGs, GIFs, or Bitmaps. And it will automatically name the new files with their date and a number or you can ask it to prompt you to name each one as it is taken. My screen captures are being automatically named by ScreenHunter and are saved as JPEGs to my desktop. From there I rename the ones I want to keep, and drop them in their appropriate folders.










I can use Pipes to combine these five feeds into one. When you “Create Your Own Pipe” you will see several options on the left and a blank canvas on the right. Since I want to mash-up feeds, I am going to select the “Fetch Feed” module on the left and drag it to the work area on the right. When I do this, a single box appears for entering RSS feed URLs. Since I have five feeds to add, I am going to click on the “+” button until I have five boxes.


You may notice that Pipes provides several options for embedding results into other web pages, or generating a single RSS feed from the output . Plus, if you create your own account, you can “clone” this Pipe and use it as a template for additional alert services simply by changing the journal feeds and filter words.