Customizable (Accessible) Bibliography Generator

(FYI: I brought up this idea in a KDAC meeting in 2022.)

Would anyone else benefit from a customizable bibliography generator in the Cataloging module?

My library would love to have this capability for our large print books and DVDs. With regards to large print titles, we imagined employing fields like, author, title, KLAS ID, publication year, and genre …and maybe annotation.

I would like one that is XML or HTML based so it generates into an accessible Word document. Up front you’d get prompted for a title for your bibliography. This title would become an <h1> in XML/HTML.  What becomes <h2>s or <h3>s depends on how you want to setup your bibliography.  I would probably set the <h2> to either author or genre, and then the titles and KLAS IDs could merge as <h3>s.Something that under the hood, might look something like this…

<h1>{Bib Title}</h1>

<h2>{genre}</h2>

<h3>{author}</h3>

<h4>{title} {KLASID}</h4>
<p>{annotation} {pub_year}</p>

<h4>{title} {KLASID}</h4>
<p>{annotation} {pub_year}</p>

<h4>{title} {KLASID}</h4>
<p>{annotation} {pub_year}</p>

<h3>{author}</h3>

<h4>{title} {KLASID}</h4>
<p>{annotation} {pub_year}</p>

<h4>{title} {KLASID}</h4>
<p>{annotation} {pub_year}</p>

I didn't add this in, but what if the title could also be a BARD hyperlink when it lands into Word?

Any thoughts? Would you use a tool like this?

Yes, that is an excellent idea, and well thought out.

I agree. Great idea and well thought out!!!
A big YES vote for this.

Yes, having it come out in Word, with BARD links would be helpful! Great idea!

A demo why we need this: We have used the Catalog Query, putting in the parameters, and exporting it to Excel to include All Fields, and customizing the columns. I just made one for Book number begins DB, title matches "dog" and Author matches "Smith". Attached are the results, and the results when I tried to wrangle it into Word. You need to copy and paste cells one by one for better results.


 

Obviously a lot of interest in this being included in KLAS, but in the meantime this is totally something that you can do right now using the Mail Merge function in Word. I can write up a more detailed tutorial if folks are interested, but you can point a Word document at specific columns of an excel document to grab per-row text while maintaining your preset formatting. Excel exports from KLAS will have consistent columns, so once you have a Word template that you're happy with it should be very quick and simple to create new bibliographies from any KLAS query you create. BARD links are a little tricky because they drop the 0 from DB0, but you could even do that with some basic Excel functions.