Well, the SFX architecture has a feature called "display logic" that
let's you on the server side determine how the menu will display based
on what services are available. This is more obviously relevant to
"digitized text availability" from Google Books than just cover images.
You might want to suppress ILL links if there is digitized text (in
fact, you probably wouldn't in that particular case, but that gives you
the idea of what things you might want to do. At least my library
wouldn't, maybe others with especially small ILL budgets might).  Or
just give a pre-ILL warning message ("are you sure the Google text isn't
sufficient?), that might be more realistic.

Anyway, you obviously couldn't do this using the existing SFX display
logic feature if the Google Books info is only client side.
Now, "impossible?"  In the world of software development, few things are
actually impossible. You could try to duplicate that feature using only
client-side Javascript hiding and showing various DIVs.  The SFX HTML
currently isn't that clean, it woudl be hard. But you have the
capability to customize the SFX HTML however you want to. (And your
customizations will likely break with a future SFX release).   So
nothings impossible, but I wouldn't want to go down that road.

Jonathan

Godmar Back wrote:
> Although I completely agree that server-side queryability is something
> we should ask from Google, I'd like to follow up on:
>
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 11:06 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> The
>>  architecture of SFX would make it hard to implement Google Books API
>>  access as purely client javascript, without losing full integration with
>>  SFX on par with other 'services' used by SFX.  We will see what happens.
>>
>>
>
> Could you elaborate? Do you mean 'hard' or 'impossible'?
>
> Meanwhile, I've extended the google book classes (libx.org/gbs ) to
> provide more flexibility; it now supports these classes:
>
> gbs-thumbnail Include an <img...> embedding the thumbnail image
> gbs-link-to-preview Wrap span in link to preview at GBS
> gbs-link-to-info Wrap span in link to info page at GBS
> gbs-link-to-thumbnail Wrap span in link to thumbnail at GBS
> gbs-if-noview Keep this span only if GBS reports that book's
> viewability is 'noview'
> gbs-if-partial-or-full Keep this span only if GBS reports that book's
> viewability is at least 'partial'
> gbs-if-partial Keep this span only if GBS reports that book's
> viewability is 'partial'
> gbs-if-full Keep this span only if GBS reports that book's viewability is 'full'
> gbs-remove-on-failure Remove this span if GBS doesn't return bookInfo
> for this item
>
>  - Godmar
>
>

--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu