Bloggerographic Instruction on WorldCat.org

Better late than never...I am now officially posting a "How to Add the WorldCat search box to your blog" set of instructions.

Why would we need them, you might wonder. WorldCat.org and the WorldCat search box is so intuitive, people will just *figure it out.* That's both true and not true. There are plenty of things that I understand and can appreciate conceptually--but if you ask me to actually MAKE THEM HAPPEN all by myself (!), sometimes I would like a bit of hand-holding.

So if you are like me, grab hold and we'll walk through together. If you've already loaded the box on your site, please share the instructions/configurations for your blogging software. I'll explain how to do it for blogger:

Step 1. Go to WorldCat.org and select the top link in the blue box, "Put our search box on your site »" You are officially becoming a WorldCat affiliate!
Step 2. Either log in or (more likely) Create an account
Step 3. Fill out the short Web form, which asks you to select a user name, password and to provide a few identifying details like e-mail address, etc. (to confirm your account).
Be prepared to agree to the terms and conditions. (It's pretty standard legalese stuff, from what I can tell.)
You can opt-in to e-mail updates from here, too.
Step 4. Voila! The resulting screen provides code to copy and paste into your blogger template.
Step 5. In a separate browser window, log in to your blogger account. Select the "Template" tab for your blog--assuming you are using a standard blogger template. If you created your own template design, rock on with your bad self.
Step 6. Take courage and scroll down in the code view. Look for the HTML comment line that begins and ends with < > and says

!-- Begin #sidebar --

Then you can decide where you'd like your box to go. On ours, I chose to put it right after our names so it stayed *above the fold.* Regardless, identify some text in the code view that you recognize where it is on the page. Get ready...
Step 7. Copy the WorldCat.org code chunk into the spot you've identified in the code view of your blogger template.
Step 8. Preview your changes, to see where the box ended up.
Step 9. Revise placement, as you see fit.
Step 10. Save changes and republish your blog!

That's it! Congratulations, you've just added the potential to find more than 1.3 billion materials in libraries worldwide. In 10 easy steps. Now, how do you do it for Movable Type and others? Comment in here, so we can all share how easy it is.