Grand Valley State University ScholarWorks@GVSU Books and Contributions to Books University Libraries 6-2016 Customizing Vendor Systems for Better User Experiences: The nnoI vative Librarian's Guide Matthew Reidsma Grand Valley State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/library_books Part of the Cataloging and Metadata Commons, and the Information Literacy Commons ScholarWorks Citation Reidsma, Matthew, "Customizing Vendor Systems for Better User Experiences: The nnoI vative Librarian's Guide" (2016). Books and Contributions to Books. 19. https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/library_books/19 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the University Libraries at ScholarWorks@GVSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Books and Contributions to Books by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@GVSU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CUSTOMIZING VENDOR SYSTEMS FOR BETTER USER EXPERIENCES 4148-900-2pass-0FM-r02.indd 1 07-04-2016 22:06:50 Recent Titles in Libraries Unlimited’s Innovative Librarian’s Guide Series Digitizing Audiovisual and Nonprint Materials: Te Innovative Librarian’s Guide Scott Piepenburg Making the Most of Digital Collections through Training and Outreach: Te Innovative Librarian’s Guide Nicholas Tanzi Digitizing Your Community’s History: Te Innovative Librarian’s Guide Alex Hoffman 4148-900-2pass-0FM-r02.indd 2 07-04-2016 22:06:50 CUSTOMIZING VENDOR SYSTEMS FOR BETTER USER EXPERIENCES Te Innovative Librarian’s Guide Matthew Reidsma INNOVATIVE LIBRARIAN’S GUIDE 4148-900-2pass-0FM-r02.indd 3 07-04-2016 22:06:50 Copyright © 2016 by Matthew Reidsma All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP data TO COME] ISBN: 978-1-4408-4384-6 EISBN: 978-1-4408-4385-3 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5 Tis book is also available as an eBook. Libraries Unlimited An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 www.abc-clio.com Tis book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America 4148-900-2pass-0FM-r02.indd 4 07-04-2016 22:06:50 Contents Acknowledgments vii Chapter 1 Library Vendor Tools 1 Chapter 2 JavaScript and Vendor Tools 11 Chapter 3 Working with Developer Tools 19 Chapter 4 JavaScript Basics 27 Chapter 5 JavaScript Bookmarklets 43 Chapter 6 Advanced JavaScript 55 Chapter 7 JavaScript Examples 67 Chapter 8 jQuery Basics 79 Chapter 9 Advanced jQuery 93 Chapter 10 jQuery Examples 105 Chapter 11 Getting Data In and Out of Vendor Tools 115 Chapter 12 AJAX Examples 127 Chapter 13 Helper Scripts in PHP 141 Conclusion 163 Index 165 4148-900-2pass-0FM-r02.indd 5 07-04-2016 22:06:50 4148-900-2pass-0FM-r02.indd 6 07-04-2016 22:06:50 Acknowledgments My name may be on this book, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. I need to thank many others who helped and encouraged me along the way. Te “Marys” at Infopeople pushed me to present on this topic, and Lise Dyckman at Libraries Unlimited convinced me that it should be a book. Any clarity in my words in these pages was coaxed out of me by Lise. Any errors remain my own. My colleagues at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) make me excited to get to work each morning. Every day all hands are on deck to improve the library for our users, and I couldn’t be more proud to be a Laker. Matt Ruen, GVSU’s Scholarly Communications librarian, ably guided me through the process of turning this book into an experiment into open access monograph publishing. Libraries Unlimited was eager to take a chance on giving the book away after three years, which is a risk for all involved. I’m glad to have them as a partner in this. I am inspired daily by Dave Pattern, Andromeda Yelton, Annette Bailey, Erin White, Shariq Torres, Alison Tinker, John Fink, Kirsten Lamb, Jenny Jing, and everyone in the library world who share their code. Tis book wouldn’t be possible without you. As I wrote this book, my family gave me a space free of computers and code but full of inspiration. Wendy, you are patient beyond measure (how do you do that?). And whenever I think something cannot be done, my children remind me that anything is possible if you start the day with a good breakfast. 4148-900-2pass-0FM-r02.indd 7 07-04-2016 22:06:50 4148-900-2pass-0FM-r02.indd 8 07-04-2016 22:06:50 Chapter 1 Library Vendor Tools If your library is like most, you have a lot of different tools that your users access over the web to get things done: catalogs (OPACs), interlibrary loan, LibGuides, discovery layers, and more. If your library is large, you might have developer (or a few) who can write custom software for your library, but chances are, your developer(s) wouldn’t be able to build and maintain an entire integrated library system (ILS) that lets your catalogers maintain MARC records, connects to external providers to import MARC records, keeps track of all circulating materials and late fines, and provides an intuitive way for your users to find the books they want. On top of that they won’t be able to tackle building an interlibrary loan (ILL) system from scratch that talked to OCLC, seamlessly sending requests to libraries around the world while keeping users up-to-date on the status of requests. Tey also won’t have the time to build a search tool that searches across all of the vendor databases your library subscribes to, integrating search results from different providers into a clean and easy-to-use results screen. Even if your developers could do these things, they most likely couldn’t do them all. And if your library is not a large library, then forget it. Even if you have a developer or two, building all of the tools you need to run a library from scratch is beyond the scope of a one- or two-person team. Build- ing and maintaining these large software programs is a huge undertaking, and in strictly economic terms, it doesn’t make much sense to pay develop- ers to create something that is available out in the marketplace for less than the combined annual salary of a handful of programmers. And because the underlying data that these programs trade in is designed to be shared across libraries—MARC records, OCLC ILL requests, and so on—it makes sense to have a few providers focus on making sure that these tools work reliably with the data formats that drive library systems today. And so our libraries purchase software from vendors: an ILS to handle cataloging, circulation, acquisitions, and run the OPAC; interlibrary loan software to borrow items from other libraries; course reserve software in aca- demic libraries to manage reserves and track copyright; discovery layers to 4148-900-2pass-01-r02.indd 1 07-04-2016 22:06:53 2 Customizing Vendor Systems for Better User Experiences make it easier to search across dozens of competing research databases. And on and on. THE STATE OF LIBRARY VENDOR TOOLS But just because we’ve all chosen to let software vendors provide the tools to run libraries doesn’t mean that we’re living in a library software paradise. In some cases, libraries do not have much of a choice at all in selecting the tools that run their day-to-day operations. Libraries that belong to a consortium often use the ILS chosen by that group, rather than choosing their own tool to fit their local workflows. Or there may be local limitations that affect the choice. Here at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Allendale, Michi- gan, we’re using the ILS that will operate the three different Automated Stor- age and Retrieval Systems (ASRS) at two of our different campuses. Because we have cranes from two different manufacturers, the choice of ILS we have is limited to whomever can talk to both of these systems fluently. Even libraries that are not constrained by consortia or technical limitations often make choices for reasons other than the best fit for the local environ- ment. Cost is a huge factor in these systems, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Many libraries have turned to open-source ILS solutions like Evergreen and Koha for this reason, although the investment in modifying these tools for the local environment is paid either through hir- ing consultants or through paying developers. But in the end, the best price might not provide the best features for library staff or library users. Because library software vendors are developing tools that can be used by any library, they also lack a lot of the local customizations that would help them fit into a library’s culture and workflow. As a result, we all have stories of how we’ve found tedious workarounds in new software so that we can continue to process invoices in the same way as the old system, or the way the billing office requires. Or we add explanatory text to a website to explain why this request button works differently this week on the new software than it did last week on the old.