Placards
With these settings, you can:
- Create a placard
- Customize a placard
- Schedule placards
- Specify keywords or phrases to trigger placards
- Disable or delete a placard
Placards are like strategic advertisements that can help you promote resources, events, lists, and more! When users perform catalog searches that match keywords or phrases you specify, your placard will appear above search results.
Looking for examples of placards? Click Here.
Our library partners have used placards in some of the following ways:
- Feature an online resource, such as Mango Languages or Chilton Auto Repair Manuals
- Link to a "While You Wait" staff list of readalikes when searching for a popular title or author
- Advertise an upcoming author talk event when searching for the author or their books
- Link to resources for suicide prevention when searching for related terms
- Promote story time or kids events when searching for popular children's book topics
To temporarily disable a placard:
-
From Aspen Administration, navigate to Local Catalog Enrichment → Placards.
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Locate the placard you wish to disable and click the ID number to edit.
-
Uncheck all libraries and locations, then save.
-
The placard will no longer appear in search results.
-
To re-activate, edit the placard again and re-select the appropriate Libraries and Locations, then save.
To permanently delete a placard:
-
From Aspen Administration, navigate to Local Catalog Enrichment → Placards.
-
Locate the placard you wish to disable and click the ID number to edit.
- Click Delete and confirm.
Want to have a placard show up on every search? Maybe you are promoting a special event, a new database, Summer Reading, or pushing a survey and you want every one searching the catalog to see it.
When setting up your placard, use the % symbol as the trigger word.
Since this will show up for every search, we suggest making this only scheduled for a certain, limited amount of time. You also may consider making this dismissible so that patrons don't continue to see it over and over.
You might have placards that share the same trigger word and are curious how Aspen handles this.
When placards share the same trigger word, the placard created first will display when that keyword is searched.
If you are using the same word across mutliple placards, we suggest you make the placards dismissible.
If a user dismissing the first placard, when they perform the keyword search again, the next placard that was created will display.
This would also be the case if the first placard was set with a start and end date. After it expires, the shared keyword will display the next created placard.
Placards can be marked Dismissable when they are created. This allows logged in users to close out the placard if they no longer wish to see it. We recommend this, especially for placards where you have assigned a lot of trigger words that are generic and might cause the placard to show repetively to users.
By default, the button for dismissal looks like this and displays the text "Don't show this again"
There are additional button options in Aspen Administration > Theme & Layout > Layout Settings:
Changes made here will be reflected immediately.
If you only select Show Dismiss Placard Button in Top Right Corner:
The button will look like this:
If you only select Show Dismiss Placard Button as X (Close) Icon:
The button will look like this:
If you select both Show Dismiss Placard Button in Top Right Corner and Show Dismiss Placard Button as X (Close) Icon:
The button will look like this:
Should a user dismiss a placard, then the placard will always remain dismissed for them.
However, Aspen ties these dismissal settings to the unique placard id. A placard with a different id value and identical trigger words as a dismissed placard will still show to all users.
If you need to update information on a dismissable placard or want to "reset" placards that may have been dismissed by users, make a new placard with the same trigger words.
Placard CSS
In your placard > CSS, add this code to create a placard button. You can change the hex codes to adjust the colors, font to adjust the font, and cutomize the sizes in this code:
.myButton {
background-color:#004d71;
border-radius:3px;
border:1px solid #124d77;
display:inline-block;
cursor:pointer;
color:#ffffff;
font-family:Montserrat;
font-size:13px;
padding:6px 24px;
text-decoration:none;
}
.myButton:hover {
background-color:#ffffff;
text-decoration:none;
}
.myButton:active {
position:relative;
top:1px;
}
To adjust these placard options with CSS, put in Themes & Layouts > Theme > click into theme > Additional CSS.
Change placard color for all placards
.placard {
background-color: #FFFFFF;
}
Change placard color for individual placard
would need the specific id of that placard
div#placard1.placard {
background-color: #FFFFFF;
}