I've had this discussion a little with farangkao in a patch thread, but I wanted to open it up to anyone else's ideas. For background - item link format changed recently, see
http://www.esoui.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1811 first post for details. TL;DR most functions now do not return a text form of the item's name when returning an item link. Items for sale in guild stores can still have their names retrieved via index, so that doesn't change, but other than that...for items in your bags, bank, or guild bank, CrazyDutchGuy has mentioned you can loop through every item in every bag until you find one with a matching link and call GetItemName() once you know the bag and slot, but that seems a little...laborious...just to get an item name string. In addition, it doesn't work at all for items in the guild store sales history, since once they show up in the history they are neither in the guild store nor in the player's bags.
So, the question is this: is there any way to approximate the behavior of GetItemName() given only a new-style item link (thus allowing you to extract the textual name of an item)? ZOS obviously has something going on internally as pasting these links into the chatbox parses them fine, they work fine for tooltips, even d() parses them correctly, but I can't seem to find anything public we could use to perform that function.