Springshare Support Blog

Facebook recently announced a new feature - Facebook Pages, which are customized “profiles” for bands, products, and organizations, including libraries. Pretty cool stuff - if your library doesn’t have a Facebook Page yet, you should create one. It’s a great way to build awareness and create library presence on Facebook.

We have developed a new Facebook app, called LibGuides Library, specifically for Library Facebook Pages. Once added to your library’s facebook page, it will provide a link to your LibGuides system, as well as invite users to add the LibGuides Facebook app to their profiles. As an added bonus, visitors to the library FB page will be able to search your library catalog.

Our newest Facebook app (we’re up to three now!) is a great way to advertise your LibGuides to the entire Facebook community, and to create awareness and drive traffic to your system. Install it today!

A big shout-out goes to Lisa Wallis, super-cool librarian at NEIU, for giving us the idea and providing feedback for this app. Here’s the link to NEIU’s Facebook Page, and below is a screenshot of the LibGuides Library app on its profile.

Springshare is happy to welcome the latest member of the LibGuides community - the NASA Glenn Technical Library!

As started on their website, the “Glenn Technical Library is a science and engineering research library providing books, journals, electronic resources and documents supporting the research in and study of aeronautics, space propulsion & power, communications technology, materials and structures, and microgravity science.”  Phew!

For more information about the Glenn Research Center please visit their website, where they offer educational resources for students of all ages.  http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/education

Good news for our librarians who have LibGuides Librarian Facebook app installed on their Facebook profile page. Namely, some of you have noticed that the list of your guides on FB profile does not update any more. Facebook has changed their API and as a result they cache all the profile content indefinitely.

Not to bore you with the technical details but we found a way around this issue. It’s not an ideal solution but it’s much better than the current way of having to uninstall the app and then install it again every time you want to update the list of your LibGuides on the Facebook profile page.

So, in the new version of the LibGuides Librarian Facebook app you will see the “update” link in the upper right corner of the app (on your profile). Just click this link to update the list of your guides (i.e. if you publish a new guide or delete one of the old ones).

Since we updated the application, you must remove the one you are currently using and then re-install it again to your Facebook profile.

As always, let us know what you think.

Librarian “Mick” is an avid LibGuides user of North Eastern Illinois University’s LibGuides. He has put together several great LibGuides-related posts on his blog. One post reveals his (excellent and very timely) thoughts about what Pathfinders 2.0 should look like - check it out at ”LibGuides and my Philosophy of Pathfinders 2.0”

In addition, Mick has also created several “How to design a LibGuide” posts. Check out Part 1 (Rich Text Box), Part 2 (Web Links), Part 3 (RSS Feeds/Podcasts), Part 4 (Videos and del.icio.us), Part 5 (Utility Boxes), and Part 6 (Profile boxes).

 Great stuff Mick, keep it up!

In response to several customer requests we have made some changes to the rich text editor included within the LibGuides application.  We want to make sure that everyone is able to get full use of this important tool, so here is a brief overview of the new options that are available to you.

On the left side, we see the new “font family” menu, which allows you to change the font face/family of content that you type or paste into the window.  Simply select the text you wish to adjust, select your new font, and the changes will be immediately reflected in the window.

On the top-right, we have added several buttons that allow you to better manage HTML tables used within the editor.  From left to right, the buttons are as follows:
     insert table, remove table
     adjust table row properties, adjust table cell properties
     insert row after, insert row before, remove row
     insert column after, insert column before, remove column

Finally, on the bottom right we have two options that should be very useful for those that are pasting content into LibGuides from other sources.  The left button allows you to paste in ‘plain text’, which will strip out all formatting from whatever content you enter.  The right button allows you to paste in ‘Word’ format, which should maintain most (if not all) of the formatting from a Microsoft Word document.  To use either of these options just open the editor normally, click the appropriate button and paste your content into the provided window.  When you close the popup window your text will show up in the main editor window in the format you have selected.

We hope these small adjustments make it even easier to use the LibGuides application.  If you have any questions or comments regarding this change, please post on our forums (http://springshare.com/community) or contact us directly for assistance!

Hello Folks,There hasn’t been much activity on our support blog because we are busy working on the new version. You’ll be impressed, I assure you

We have a question for the community, and some feedback would be appreciated. In the next release, we are thinking of making available raw weblog statistics for each library (on a monthly basis). These logs would offer a wealth of data which goes far beyond the basic statistics offered thru the LibGuides interface. You would be able to see things like user’s browser types and versions, screen resolutions, access times, busy times when the usage of your system is at its peak, the length of user sessions, search terms, search engine hits, etc. The amount of detail will depend on the weblog statistics package you use at your library (WebTrends, Google Analytics, AWStats, etc.) and what specific information is most important to you.

Would you like to have these raw logs available for download? This question is mainly for LibGuides system administrators. Let us know – either post a comment on our user community forums, or send us an email to support@springshare.com