Jon Udell offers a nifty new bookmarklet to boost your use of your local library catalog, and in the process finds an elegant and compelling argument for why the future of information technology webservices needs the REST paradigm:

When I showed one librarian why her OPAC system wouldn't cooperate with LibraryLookup, she concluded that her vendor had used "the wrong kind of software." And I agreed. She has never read Roy Fielding's thesis and never will, but she groks the REST principles intuitively. What she was saying, though she lacked the terminology to describe it, is that her OPAC is broken because it's not RESTful. And if she has any say in the matter, the next OPAC her library buys will be.

[ Source: The Beauty of REST ]