Prompting For Programming: Use AI to Visualize Analytics Data

Many libraries want richer, more dynamic views of Analytics data, but building custom dashboards often feels out of reach without formal programming experience or deep pockets. This session describes how a systems librarian without a programming background used ChatGPT as a coding assistant to design a dynamic, web-based analytics dashboard using the Alma Analytics API. This presentation will emphasize the process of collaborating with AI: translating library assessment questions into API queries, scaffolding JavaScript and visualization code, debugging errors, and iterating toward usable results. Attendees will see a concrete example of how human domain expertise and AI-generated code can complement one another, as well as common pitfalls, limitations, and ethical considerations when working with institutional data.