On Wednesday I added two more libraries to the viaLibri library search page: The German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek to be precise) and the Thomas J. Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The first of these is, well, the national library of Germany and one might reasonably ask why we weren’t including it already. In fact, when I first started work on our library search tool the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, as such, had not really existed for more than a few years – although it did have roots going back much further than that. I don’t know when their catalogue finally went online, but I’m glad that one of our regular users did eventually alert me to the fact. It took me far too long after that to follow up, but it has now, at last, been taken off my to-do list.

The second library to be added is the important reference collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This numbers over a million volumes, including 125,000 auction catalogues and a significant collection of early and rare books related to the history of art. I would also note that the online catalogue is named Watsonline after Thomas J. Watson, the CEO and chairman of IBM who, if I may be permitted to digress, could easily be called the founder of the commercial computer industry. Except that there were actually two Thomas J. Watsons, father and son, both of whom ran IBM, one after the other, and could equally claim this credit. And on top of that it seems to be a secret which one of them should get credit for the library.

Digressing yet further, I feel compelled to mention that when my father and the younger Watson were growing up in Short Hills, New Jersey, my father beaned the latter with a rotten tomato during some great battle the other details of which I once knew but have since forgotten. I do know that no return strike was registered on my father’s own person by either Watson or his cohorts. My father did later move on to some fame and glory as the starting pitcher for his college fraternity baseball team. After that he became a management consultant who was often quoted on the subject of computers with the observation that “they’re faster, but they take longer.” Watson Jr. did also have some success in other fields.

In any case, you will need to look for “Watsonline” if you want to find the button that will search their books.

I should also point out that both of these libraries were added as a direct result of requests from regular users. It’s not that I was holding back and waiting for someone to ask; it’s only that sometimes a specific library just hadn’t occurred to us yet, or in other cases it is a library that did not have workable online access when the Quick Query feature was launched, but has since been upgraded and can now easily join the group. If you know of such a library please let me know.

And if you happen to notice a broken link for one of the libraries we already search then that is also something I am eager to hear about. Our latest update includes fixing a number of links that had gone bad since the last time we tested them thoroughly. It is an endless task. Progress and improvement are wonderful things (or so I’m told) but when they happen to websites and online services the most frequent result is broken links. So if you do happen to stumble upon some new outbreak of library improvement please let me know so that I can fix its aftermath as quickly as possible.

We have just added to our search results a short notation indicating the country from which a listed book will be shipped. The information will be found, in brackets, to the right of the bookseller’s name. If you are concerned about delivery time or shipping costs, this feature will help you to identify books that can be shipped from someplace near by.

Over the years many users have asked us to include this information and we are very happy to be able to do so at last. Unfortunately, a couple of sites do not yet give us the location data we need and cannot be included in this feature; but we think that “most” is still better than “none”.

If you are among our many users who regularly search for early editions only to receive search results that are swamped with modern reprints then our first new feature should be of great interest. We have now added a check box that allows you to exclude from your search results all books which have been assigned an ISBN number.

The general use of ISBN numbers did not begin until the 1970s, so it is fairly safe to assume that any book which has been assigned one will not have been printed before then. Most online second-hand booksellers are careful to include ISBNs, when known, as part of their descriptions. By checking the box marked “No ISBNs” you can thus filter out a large number of modern reprints of older titles.

The filtering is not complete, since there are still some booksellers who do not use ISBN when cataloging their books, but the number that can be eliminated in this way is substantial. When used along with our “No PODs” check box you should be able to avoid much of the annoying chaff that would otherwise clutter your searches for old and rare books. And we have also updated the Search Manager to make use of this new filter, so if you are using Libribot you can also update your wants to reduce the number of unwanted matches.