There’s this idea that’s been percolating for a few months, and I might finally have real way to create it. I want to take identifiers from the item page a patron is viewing and pass that information into the chat screen when the patron clicks on a new chat session. Big Brother, you ask? Perhaps, but it would cut down on a lot of mistakes when chasing down citations.

Here’s the catch: I have almost no experience coding whatsoever. I can read it (kind of), paste it into boxes, and compliment its pretty blue eyes. But create it? Yeah, right.

Enter the Link Resolver. We’re implementing a new link resolver, and our electronic resources librarian asked about adding our new chat button to the screen. No problem, Springshare has this magical machine that generates JavaScript code to my heart’s content. And what would be better than if that first message a librarian sees is the bibliographic data included in the link resolver’s URL? By nature, there’s plenty of information there – title, journal, doi, etc. I just (JUST) have to figure out how to parse it into key:value pairs that the script can interpret and display.

Once it works for this, it can be adapted for WorldCat, EDS, pretty much any database, I’d imagine. Especially with the Schema.org standards, as Karen Coombs recently advised me.

message: “???”

Can you help?