The forgotten feature: The Library of Congress

There is one feature that I implemented shortly before creating this blog that probably should be mentioned here.

Centrifuge takes advantage of the SRU (Search and Retrieve over URL) service of the Library of Congress. What does that mean?

It's simpe: whenever you enter a unique identifier like ISBN or ISSN for an item either while editing or creating a new item entry, a query will be send to the LOC and if they have data on this item the information will be retrieved. For the end user this means that he will see below several fields like title, author, year etc a non-modifable field 'Suggestion'. The user can then simply copy and paste (as well as modify) the retrieved information into the actual fields.

In essence, this can be a huge timesaver. You don't have to flip through the book to dig up the publisher or the year of publication, it's right there!