Springshare Support Blog

Congratulations to Ken, and the rest of the team at Boston College, for taking their “LibGuides @ BC” system live this week.

It really is amazing how much they have achieved in only a few weeks time, and I’m sure the best is yet to come!

If you looking for an excellent example of what the LibGuides system is capable of, I highly recommend that you explore what BC has created at http://libguides.bc.edu.

You can also find Ken’s original announcement, as well as his “rocket” image, at http://commtopics.blogspot.com/2007/08/weve-launched-libguides-bc.html.

It has always been possible to use tables within a Rich-Text box if you know how to hand-code HTML – a decidedly “Web 1.0″ skillset.  To make this easier for the WYSIWYG crowd, we have added a new “insert table” button to the rich-text editor in LibGuides.  Here are the simple steps to insert tables into your boxes:

1) Click the new “insert table” button to open the table properties popup window:

2) In the new window, choose how many rows and columns of data you would like to have in your table.  This should be very familar if you have ever inserted a table into a Word document.  You can also choose how your table is displayed, by changing the border, padding, and more:

3) Click the “Insert” button to add an empty table to the text editor window.  As expected, you can type your text right into the table cells:

4) Click the “Save Changes” button, and your table will be saved to your box:

One of the great features of IE7 is the ability to search sites like Wikipedia, Google, About.com, and (uhh??) Wal-Mart from a toolbar conveniently located right in the browser.  It should come as little surprise that our LibGuides application has been added to this distinguished list!

With the LibGuides Search Provider you can now search your entire system without having to first navigate to the LibGuides homepage, saving valuable seconds that can be better used on YouTube.  To install the provider in your IE7 browser just do the following…

1) In the upper-right corner of your browser click the arrow next to the magnifying glass, and select “Find More Providers” from the list.

2) On the add-provider page, enter the URL in the format “http://{domain}/search.php?search=TEST” - be sure to replace {domain} with your LibGuides domain.  You can name the provider whatever you would like, but we recommend “LibGuides Search” to keep things simple.

3) Click Install, accept the security prompt, and you have installed the LibGuides Search Provider in your browser!  To test the provider, enter any search term(s)into the search box, and select the newly created “LibGuides Search” from the dropdown list.

4) If all went well, you should be whisked away to a set of search results showing all matching items in your LibGuides system.  Next time you want to locate something in LibGuides, just enter your search string in the box, select LibGuides, and you will jump right to the results!

** To all rabid FireFox advocates out there, we didn’t forget about you.  A provider for FireFox should be coming in the next couple of weeks **