I became familiar with Bookjetty at the VALA conference this year when Singapore's Schubert Foo mentioned this home-grown tool in his keynote address. I was immediately struck by the difference between Bookjetty and other book sites, namely that you could search library catalogues as well as bookshops. I set myself the post-conference task of looking into it properly and seeing if we could get Boroondara's catalogue up on the site. Well, we succeeded in that and our users can now use Bookjetty to search our library catalogue (along with others) and easily link to the site to place a reservation.
LibraryThing also now has access to library catalogues for searching. They weren't able to do this last time I used them, but I did say they were going from strength to strength! Thanks to Casey from LibraryThing for pointing this out to me. However, the standout thing for me about Bookjetty from the minute I saw it demonstrated by Dr Foo was the federated searching capability. At Bookjetty, you select your favourite libraries from a list and your item will be searched for on these simultaneously, rather than you having to go to each catalogue. As three of Boroondara's neighbouring libraries, Stonnington, Monash and Darebin, are now accessible via Bookjetty, this provides a useful local federated search facility. It will be interesting to see how Bookjetty continues to develop.
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