One Form to Rule Them All: A Simple Codebase for Streamlined Search Form Creation and Management

Creating and managing database search forms can feel like a daunting task. Vendor form builders often produce overweight, complex, heavily styled code that may not support remote authentication or meet accessibility standards, are hard to reformat, are easy to break, and stop working the moment the vendor updates the platform. To address these challenges, we have developed a single, streamlined codebase that can be reused to create search forms for most databases that support stable URLs for result lists. Using this codebase, we can quickly create, customize, troubleshoot, and maintain search forms for a variety of databases. Also, our public service librarians can customize these forms more easily without risk of breaking the underlying code. This poster provides a detailed overview to this codebase and offers examples of its use in LibGuides and LibAnswers.