Forward to Libraries: Toronto Public Library added

If you’re starting your research on Wikipedia, you’ll need to see what books are available on a subject for further study. Previously, you’d need to trawl the references manually, but John Mark Ockerbloom‘s Forward To Libraries (FTL) service makes that a whole lot easier. What FTL does is allow you to reach into nearly any library’s catalogue search from a subject link on Wikipedia.

John’s been getting some great press on this service, so I asked him to add Toronto Public Library to FTL. Here’s how it works:

Pretty neat, huh? Try other articles, like Pierre Trudeau, Arduino or the Canadian Shield.

It’s not actually that hard to add Library resources boxes to Wikipedia articles. There’s a tutorial in the Template:Library resources box page that shows you how. Researching the locator is the most difficult part, and that gets a lot easier the more you add.

The Real World of Scrawl

Man, this kind of vandalism really gets my goat:

You know it’s bad when a scribbler has to start using a different colour of highlighter just to make their point.

The most annoying one isn’t shown, though. In one chapter, Ursula uses the phrase “technology as a means of control“.  The in(s)ane scribbler had  overwritten “technology is a means of control“. Grar!