I did some JavaScripting yesterday that I thought might be of interest to librarians who use LibGuides and LibAnswers. The impetus for this was that some of the librarians at my college were dissatisfied with the “Email Me” buttons that are on LibGuides’ profile pages and profile boxes.

I have to agree, the Email Me buttons are not great. They’re old-timey “mailto” links, which are notorious for often attempting to open an email client that is not actually set up. Besides wanting to avoid that obvious annoyance, we also wanted something that would add a patron’s question to a LibAnswers queue, instead of sending an email. A queue is preferable to an email because it will help prevent a question from getting lost somewhere in a librarian’s inbox, and also any librarian can claim it, hopefully improving response times.

Anyhow, it only took a little bit of JS, CSS and a widget from LibAnswers. The code is in our kingsborough-libguide repository on GitHub. I’d like to remove the jQuery from this snippet, but that may have to wait a day or two.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.