This is a tool for finding books that are available in nearby branches of my public lending library.

It shows me a list of books I can borrow immediately:

I don't expect anybody else will want to use this exact tool, but some of the ideas might be reusable.

How it works:

• get_book_data.py scrapes the library website and saves the data about books I'm interested in to a JSON file.
• render_data_as_html.py renders the JSON file as an HTML file which I can view in my browser. Having this be a separate step means I can tweak the presentation without having to redownload all the book data.

Some useful Python libraries:

• I'm using mechanize to pretend to be a browser, and log into the library website. This is loosely based on some code for scraping Spydus by Mike Jagdis.
• I'm using BeautifulSoup to parse the library website HTML.
• I'm using Jinja to render the data as HTML.