libraryh3lp chat widgets in ebscohost

[Aaron Tay]

Just wondering has anyone had experience embedding libraryh3lp widgets
into ebscohost platform (not EDS)?
http://support.epnet.com/knowledge_base/detail.php?topic=996&id=4713&page=1

Questions

1. Is it possible to embed at a database level, or is it embedded at
one go for all databases on the platform (suspect so)?

2. Anyone tried adding either a popup chat widget or even a followme
widget? So far, I've seen examples that are embedded widgets only, but
it strikes me popup and followme widget might even be better but not
sure if it is allowed.

[smudgy]

We have been experimenting with -- but have not yet implemented -- the Ebsco chat widget. The normal embedded widgets seem to work fine; the popup widget also works. Haven't tried the followme widget.

There are a couple of limitations:

Ebsco widgets only appear in search results. There's no option for having a widget on the start page or in item records.

There are several Ebsco-created widgets that always live above the library's custom widgets: this includes at least an "AP News Wire" widget and a "Related pictures" widget. Both of these can be disabled -- the newswire one seems manifestly useless to me, but depending on your user base there may be a call for the "related pictures" one. But both of these push your widget down on the page, so bear that in mind.

Also, the widget panel is always on the right.

That's about all I can think of for now. As soon as we come up with some language and graphics for our popup widget button, we're probably going to just go ahead and implement it.

As for your first question: I don't know whether it can be turned on database by database. That might cause some interesting problems when you do a cross-database search...

Overall Ebsco has been very responsive with letting us try different things in a test implementation, so you might contact your representative and ask about getting a test environment set up.

That's it for now!

-dre.

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[Jeff Karlsen]

I've played around with it, and popup has worked just fine. On your first question, the widget (like the branding, custom links, etc.) is tied to the profile. So if you wanted it on some databases but not others, you could create a profile that only included the databases you wanted. This might create some issues though in the way that you link to the databases from your library portal, etc.--might be more trouble than it's worth. I don't know of any other way to do it.