Springshare Support Blog

Here are the most recent stats for the LibGuides community!  In June we welcomed 66 new libraries to the LibGuides community, our busiest month to date!

A large update was applied to the LibGuides servers last night that included many new features, optimizations, and other improvements.  Here are a few of the more noteable changes that were made:

• RSS Feeds: Users can now subscribe to several different RSS feeds that contain information about content being added to LibGuides.  These feeds are setup to display information about a) content added to a specific guide, b) content added by a specific librairan/user, or b) content added to the entire system.
• Guide Co-Owners:  You can now assign co-owners to a guide, which will cause the co-owners’ profiles to display on the guide along with the original guide owner.  In addition, the names of the co-owners will be listed after the guide creators name on the homepage, browse page, user profile page, etc.
• User Submitted Link Moderation: To help reduce the chance of spam, user submitted links will not show up until they have been approved by a guide owner/editor or site admin.  In addition, the email address of the person who submitted the link will no longer be shown to the public and the submitter name is now optional.
• Improved Search: The search engine has been updated so that guides with titles or descriptions maching the search term are returned first, with full-text matches included in a second set of results.

Here are a few of the smaller changes that were also included during this update:

• Entires in the Date/Event boxes can now have an optional “End Date”.
• The “secure/non-secure” prompt displayed when accessing the login page using Internet Exporer is now gone for most users.
• When users enter a link that contains the proxy prefix in the link URL they will be asked if they want to use the proxy checkbox instead.
• Added “Last Login” column to the account management screen.
• Created a new statistics report that shows information for “All My Guides”.

If you have any questions or comments about these changes please feel free to send them to us via email or post them to the Springshare Lounge so they can be shared with the rest of the LibGuides Community.

It has been a busy summer for us at Springshare, and we have a lot of exciting news to announce, so lets get to it!

Starting things off, the LibGuides Community has been growing at a record pace over the last few months.  We added 43 libraries in March, 52 in April, an astounding 57 libraries in May, and 31 through the first 1/3rd of June.  Just today we installed LibGuides member site #700 as part of the Elmbrook School District’s adoption of LibGuides, and we have many more libraries joining up before the end of the month.

We are in the final testing phases of the latest LibGuides update, which we hope to have copied out to the live servers within the next week.  This update contains many small improvements, as well as some long-requested features, all of which we will detail on the blog once the changes have been taken live.  Keep an eye out for that announcement in the next week or so.

The LibAnswers and CampusGuides beta systems are also getting some last minute improvements before we take them live.  We are looking foward to getting these new apps into the real-world as soon as possible, so be sure to watch this site for more information about the beta program.

Last but not least, we have received our booth assignment for ALA Chicago – come say hello at booth #2757 between July 11th and 14th.  We look foward to seeing you there!

Here are the most recent stats for the LibGuides community!

Here are the most recent stats for the LibGuides community!

It was two years ago today that Temple University became the first member library of the LibGuides community.  In those early days we were thrilled to add just one or two new libraries each month as word began to spread about the cool things you could do with LibGuides.  Today, LibGuides is growing by one or two libraries each day (!!) and our level of excitement and commitment has never been higher!

We at Springshare want to take this opportunity to once again thank the 620 libraries and 10,000 librarians who have joined the LibGuides community.  Our success is a direct result of all the great feedback we receive from our users, and we look forward to continuing to grow and improve our community based on your suggestions!

Happy Spring everyone – our favorite season here at Springshare!

As you know, we are constantly striving to improve LibGuides based on the feedback we receive from our community members.  In that regard, we are pleased to announce that we have upgraded LibGuides to support secure logins via HTTPS/SSL.  From now on, when you login to LibGuides you will be auto-redirected to a secure channel before being prompted for your login and password.  This will augment the security measures we already had in place within the LibGuides site and network.

We also are happy to share some exciting news we’ve been working on for a while  – two cool new products from Springshare Labs:

CampusGuides is a new product based on the LibGuides platform, which will extend the content creation and collaboration capability to any group on campus – faculty, students, staff, etc.  This will create many exciting opportunities for collaboration and creation of even more quality content in your systems.  CampusGuides will include categorizations of guides into logical groups, css customization for individual guides, password protection for guides, etc.  We plan to unveil a CampusGuides beta in early May, in order to solicit on user feedback, and then announce an official release over the summer.

LibAnswers is a new question-and-answer service built specifically for libraries.  Using LibAnswers, librarians will be able to answer questions in a public forum and point visitors to library resources that are related to the question/topic at hand.  Answers can contain document attachments and embedded videos as well as links to applicable resources within LibGuides.  Visitors will be able to comment on and improve the answers, so there will be a strong social component to the system.  By embedding LibAnswers widgets on other websites, blogs, courseware systems, etc. your users will be able to ask you questions from anywhere on the web, for a true “meet the user wherever they are” experience.  Users will be able to submit questions into LibAnswers via Twitter, as well as from their iPhones or Facebook.  In addition to being a very useful web 2.0 question-and-answer service, LibAnswers will also be a great content-discovery and outreach tool for libraries, to help you engage more people and promote library resources.  LibAnswers will be tightly integrated with LibGuides, and as such it will help drive traffic to your LibGuides site (and vice versa).  The Beta will be unveiled in early May, with the production system to follow in the summer.

We at Springshare look forward to working with you on LibGuides, CampusGuides and LibAnswers!

Here are the most recent stats for the LibGuides community…another record month in terms of visitors and views!

One more reminder that Springshare will be attending the ACRL conference in Seattle this upcoming weekend.  Please visit us at Booth #639 and be sure to bring your questions and suggestions related to LibGuides!

More importantly, there are seven (!!) presentations discussing real-world examples of LibGuides and its impact on student research.  You can find a list of these presentations on the Springshare Lounge ACRL page or by viewing the ACRL conference program.

Online discussions of LibGuides are coming at a fast-and-furious pace these days; here are a few of our favorite blog posts and reviews from the last few weeks:

Loving LibGuides – The Unquiet Librairian
A week or so ago, my library’s subscription to LibGuides went live!  I have designed three research pathfinders so far, and I am totally in love with the clean design I can produce with ease…

Instructional Technologies, Teaching & Learning in Medicine, Web 2.0: Oncology, LibGuides and Delicious - EBM and Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC
Librarians at Lyman Maynard Stowe Library purchased a subscription to a course management system called LibGuides in August 2008.  It has proven to be a good investment…

LibGuides as Pathfinders – Archipelago
At ALA in Anaheim this summer, I discovered LibGuides, and my teaching has changed dramatically because of it…

Teaching Library Stuff - The Logical Operator
…I wonder if the idea that this guide was created for them, and them specifically, pulled them in little more deeply. Not to mention having an online tool that helps them penetrate the navigation scheme of the library home page and get right to the important stuff…