Does anyone know how to add a custom button to their online catalog?

We would like to add a button to each entry of the search results of our online catalog. For exmaple, if someone is searching for "Harry Potter" through our web catalog, they would get a listing of about 15 items that we have in the library for that. Next to each item, we would like to add a button "Found It" for our study that we are doing to track relevancy in opacs. Any ideas or better yet examples?

Laura

• software
• opac
• innovative-interfaces

Comments

Answer by Jakob

Your opac, like any other opac, is an instance of a web application, so you need to modify this particular piece of software. A programmer should know how to add the required button after having looked at the source code of your OPAC. That's the general answer.

The specific answer depends on what OPAC you use. Can you name the OPAC or vendor? From a technical point of view it may be easier to implement the buttons with JavaScript. This way you only need to modify one line of code in your opac such as:

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://example.org/survey.js">

All addition functionality can then be implemented in a JavaScript file at http://example.org/survey.js without having to deal with complicated details of the opac software.

Please ask another question if you are interested in alternatives how to track relevancy in opacs, so we don't have to mix independent issues (first which method to use, and second how to implement one particular method) in one question!

Comments

• Joe: And, if you have access to control all of the client machines, there are programs like greasemonkey which let you dynamically insert javascript when visiting given websites.
• Laura: Thanks for the answer, to qualify the question a bit more: (a) the vendor is innovative (b) that is exactly what we had in mind, that is, have some one-liner javascript line that would present the button. the bigger question is that could we append to the button link the specifics of the item such as the call number of the book? For example: ...src="http://example.org/survey.js?callnum='abc 123' ... thank you
• Jakob: Not quite. The JavaScript inclusion would always be the same. Call numbers must be present in the HTML near where to show the buttons. The JavaScript code then then search for call numbers and add the buttons.
• Arash Milani: Actually You Don't need to append the call numbers to that js file. It's quite simple task for javascript to look for each item in you list and add even very specific button per list item.