The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
My LibGuides profile has some information about me and I would like to be able to show it on other web pages outside LibGuides, such as in Moodle or a student portal. That's possible using the LibGuides API if I want to specify my profile directly by saying "insert wdenton's profile here." But what I would like to do is search all of my library's profiles for "s:SC/MATH", find the one that matches (mine), and embed the box elsewhere.
s:SC/MATH is the code we use to say that a librarian has subject responsibilities for the science faculty's mathematics program. We use these tags in various places to associate guides with eresources and librarians, but there's no programmatic way that I can see to say somewhere "this resource is tagged with subject X and here is the contact information for the librarian who handles that subject, found by automatically pulling it in from LibGuides through a search for X."
Has anyone done this?
wdenton
No, it's not currently possible. The LibGuides API does not allow you to filter responses by any kind of string for any call. In order to get a profile from LibGuides, you need to feed it a user ID (an internal number).
If you were ambitious, you could create a middleware app to handle it. Use the API to get a list of all of those users. Scrape the profile contents from all of those users and index it in a datastore of some sort. Create your own API on top of that index that will give you a list of user IDs based on a search string. Feed those user IDs back into the LibGuides API to get the profiles.
That is a slow and incredibly roundabout way of getting what you are after. You might have more luck asking Springshare for this feature as they are quite responsive when it comes to feature requests (in my experience).
As Sean noted, it's not possible right now, but I filed the request with LibGuides (through Twitter, actually) and they've added it to their list.
Following his idea of middleware in the meantime, I wrote a couple of Ruby scripts that generate an RSS feed of librarians matching given subjects and the code is available here:
https://github.com/wdenton/my-libguides-librarians
It's customized for York University Libraries but could be customized fairly easily. Note that it generates a list of relevant librarians (or more generically reference desks, if no librarian exists or wants to be listed publicly) but doesn't include the actual profile box. That's easy to find when you know the librarian's ID, but takes up a lot of space on a web page, especially when there might be more than one, so we're just using links by name.