We had always intended to add additional free online library sources like the Library Congress to function with the MARC function. There were two criteria:
1. The site had to be free, and
2. The site had to be dependable.
If the site were not free we would have to increase our price accordingly which is not part of our mission of having excellent and reasonably priced software.
The other was that we had to have the confidence the site was accessible a reasonable amount of the time.
I know it can be frustrating to enter an ISBN and have the search fail. There isn't any way I can expect the Library of Congress to have every book in its database. An additional source or two where sorely needed to make this function more usable. Until recently I had not been able to find a source for any other database other than the Library of Congress.
I did find one. IRSpy is the name of the site. Strange name, but it is a very useful site. Here is the link: http://targettest.indexdata.com/
IRSpy has hundreds of free library listings from libraries all over the world. Not only does the site have the information I needed to connect to these sites but it also rated them. I have added about 60 sites to the Library of Congress. The sites are categorized as educational, public and religious. I only selected sites with a rating reliability of 90% or greater.
You are able to connect to IRSpy, view their listing and add a library to the MLM MARC site data file so you can use this site in addition to the ones we have included.
We also identified the country which will allow our patrons from other than the United States to select their own national library if they would like.
Enter a valid ISBN number and click the search button to start the process. The MARC function will start searching until either all sites have been searched or the ISBN is found.
Please note that searching all sites can take some time. On our production workstation connected to the Internet via a 10 Meg cable it took almost a 3 minutes to search every site included in our default list. If you have DSL or a standard 3 Meg cable connection it will take longer.
To help with this problem we have added a check box to every site record called favorite. The default search option is Favorites. These sites are ones that we think will offer the best results. They include the Library of Congress, many public libraries and all of the religious library sites.
We have also added a search order feature. When using the Favorite search option with the search order you can specify which library sites to search first. If this search fails then try searching all of the MARC sites.
Of course if there are any sites you do not want to search or whatever reason you can delete the site from the list by clicking the Delete button.
We believe that the addition of these additional sites will increase the possibility of finding a match for the ISBN. However, I do want to say that some of these sites do not have all the same information as the Library of Congress. I found some instances where the ISBN was found but a Dewey decimal number was not returned though the other information was correct. Please keep this in mind and do not call RCL Software. We only report the information we find.