Springshare Support Blog

I am pleased to announce the availability of the link checker function in LibGuides. The system will check for broken links inside LibGuides boxes (for all boxes except the rich text box type) twice a month and produce the report which will enable you to fix these broken links easily. The function is available on the main admin screen, please see the screenshot below.

As always, your feedback and suggestions are always appreciated so try out the link checker and let us know what you think.

LibGuides is now OpenSearch compliant!  From the OpenSearch Wikipedia page:

“OpenSearch is a collection of technologies that allow publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation. It is a way for websites and search engines to publish search results in a standard and accessible format.”

What does this mean for your library patrons?  The OpenSearch specification provides web browsers with a means to auto-detect search engines, and query sites from within the browsers internal search bar.  This works in modern browsers such as Internet Explorer 7+ and FireFox 2+ (pictured below).

By adding OpenSearch to LibGuides, we get the additional benefit of automatic support for the popular LibX browser plug-in for libraries.  For those of you not familiar with LibX, it allow libraries to create a custom browser toolbar, allowing simple searching of catalogs, databases, and now LibGuides! 

To see this in action you can visit the LibX Edition Builder and go to the ‘Catalogs & Databases’ tab.  Enter your LibGuides URL into the ‘Auto Detection’ box (seen below), and the Edition Builder will add LibGuides search support to your LibX toolbar.  Thanks to Godmar at LibX for helping us with this implementation!

Thoughts, comments or questions about these new features?  Don’t keep them to yourself - share your ideas with other LibGuides users at the Springshare Lounge.

Thanks to the (awesome) feedback and ideas from our client libraries LibGuides is getting better all the time. The latest round of feedback/ideas resulted in the 4 new features we just released.

1. The new look for the Community Site (http://community.libguides.com), with cleaner interface and the ability to browse guides by Subject. See more in-depth description of the new community site at the end of this post.
2. Improved “Browse All Guides” page for individual LibGuides sites, giving users the ability to browse/list of guides at your institution sorted by Title, by Subject, and by Author. For example check out the new browse all guides page on our demo site - http://demo.libguides.com/browse.php.
3. The new API function for generating the list of Subjects for your LibGuides site. This new API function is available under the “Widgets & API” tab on the main admin screen. With this new API function you can embed the list of your LibGuides subjects into any other webpage outside of LibGuides.
4. LibX search integration with LibGuides search. This is really cool - LibX is a popular open-source library search browser toolbar and now you can search your LibGuides content via LibX. We have worked with LibX developers to make LibGuides full text search available thru LibX. A separate post on how to configure LibX toolbar to search is coming later today.

New look for the Community Site
You will notice a new look with the tabbed interface when you go to http://community.libguides.com. The new site makes it easier to find interesting guides and look for ideas for creating new guides for your particular subject speciality. Simply click on “Explore Guides” tab and select “Guides by Subject” (here is the direct link - http://community.libguides.com/community.php?m=g&s=all). We also aggregated the list of all our client libraries, together with the google maps mashup showing all of them on the world map, into the ”Browse Institutions” tab (http://community.libguides.com/community.php?m=i). We are planning further improvements to the Community Site, so please let us know what else you’d like to see there.

We’re excited to unveil our new (and much improved) user forums/LibGuides users network/videos/calendar of events website - The Springshare Lounge at http://springsharelounge.com.

The Lounge is the next step in our community-building efforts - it is a true social network for our librarians to exchange ideas, questions, comments, suggestions, etc. Our old user forums had serious limitations, which is why they never took off - there was no way to export forums as rss feeds, get email notifications about the activity, etc. The new platform does all this and much more. For example, you can subscribe to RSS feeds to follow the latest activity and updates, RSS feeds for specific forum topics, LibGuides events updates, training videos, documents, email alerts about new posts, etc. The list of cool features is too long to mention here so head over to http://springsharelounge.com, register, and start using the site.

We will keep the old user forums website live until the end of the year, to help with the smooth transition to the new platform.

If you have any ideas/suggestions/questions about The Springshare Lounge, we’re all ears - as always!

We’ve achieved a lot of “firsts” in the Library software world in terms of web 2.0 stuff - LibGuides was one of the first commercial library software with a Facebook app (we now have three), among the first to integrate with Del.icio.us, etc.

Today I am pleased to announce another “first” and, perhaps, the coolest one yet - Twitter integration. Now when you publish a new guide you can broadcast the news on Twitter for all your faithful followers to see. Anybody subscribed to your Twitter updates will see the name of your newly published guide and the URL to access it. It’s a great way to advertise your guides to the Twitter universe (which is getting bigger by the minute)!

Pretty cool stuff, you must admit. We thought so too…

The “post to twitter” option is available on the change status screen, when you go to change the status of your guide to “published”.

I’d like to thank our tech team, especially the resident Twitter-expert Marc, for implementing another “first”web 2.0 integration in the commercial library software world, thereby solidifying the LibGuides’ position as the leading web 2.0 platform for libraries! 

This is really cool! We utilized the Google Books API to create a new content box type called “Google Books Search Box”. This box enables visitors to search the Google Books service, and even read the full-text of books, where available. Check out the screenshot:

Besides enabling your users to search Google Books inside your guide, you can also define a “default search query” whose results will load when the user views the page initially. At the bottom of the box there is a always a link to get more results at the Google Books website.

We’re very excited about the Google Books box in LibGuides. It is yet another example of LibGuides’ deep integration with other web services. Your guides aggregate various content sources in one place, providing a very convenient and useful resource to your patrons. In addition to accessing many resources provided by your library, with the Google Books box your patrons can access the vast Google Books database, all within LibGuides. Pretty cool stuff. Try it out - your patrons will appreciate it!

Please let us know what you think, and how we can further improve LibGuides. Also, check out the other new box type we announced today - the Feedback box. Here’s the blog post about it.

We are excited to announce the availability of two new LibGuides content box types - the Feedback Box and the Google Books Search box (to be discussed in a separate blog post).

The Feedback box enables guide authors to “standardize” collection of feedback about their guides. The box is very simple to create - when adding a new box to your guide, simply select the ”Feedback Box” from the list of available box types. This will create a box that looks something like this:

Size-wise, this is an ideal box for the side columns. Just like with every other box type, you can customize the intro text (e.g. the “Let us know what you think…” text in the screenshot above). You can not, however, customize the actual questions (3 questions) - we designed this box to be “short-and-sweet”, and standardized across all guides, because our experience and user testing shows that visitors are not as likely to provide feedback and suggestions if they have to fill out long forms. The shorter the form, the more chance people will respond. If you need to create elaborate feedback questions, you can always use our “Polls” box type to create custom polls.

The results of the user’s feedback are emailed to the guide owner (and to the page owner, if someone else other than the guide owner has created the page in question).

Marc has created a pretty cool Google Maps mashup which shows the locations of all our LibGuides member libraries. Check it out at http://community.libguides.com/community_map.php. You can zoom in and out, and clicking on any blue push pins will reveal the institution name as well as their LibGuides URL.  

The map is also available from the main Community Site (http://community.libguides.com) , by clicking on the “Member Map” link. We will be updating this map with every new client, so keep checking it regularly - until you can’t see the earth from all the blue pins

http://community.libguides.com/community_map.php

We rolled out another set of new LibGuides features this weekend. There are a lot of little things in this release, like code optimizations which will make the pages load faster, but the main new features are:

1. Sys admins now have a real user account management console, from which they can create new accounts, promote existing accounts to admin-level (and demote them as well), reset passwords, and delete user accounts. If you are a LibGuides admin, check out the new console, you’ll be impressed. On the main admin page, click on the “Manage Other Accounts” link. See screenshot below.
   
2. New API function for embedding your LibGuides profile box elsewhere (on any html page).
3. New API function for embedding the LibGuides search box on any webpage. This box is similar in function to ebsco or proquest-type widgets which many of our users embed into their guides. Now you can embed the LibGuides search box which will search your local LibGuides system. See example below:
   

   Search LibGuides Demo:

Both of these new API calls are available on the “API Utility” page, under the “Widgets & API” tab on the main admin screen.

Among the new features we announced today, the “Google Search Box” content box type is perhaps the most important because it is a harbinger of future functionality for searching content inside LibGuides boxes.

Our grand plan for world library domination involves creating a set of APIs which anybody (e.g. library techies who wish to create native catalog search content box in LibGuides, or database publishers who wish to create a content box for searching of their database content within LibGuides) can use to create their own content box types and include them in the content box library inside LibGuides. We will release these APIs later this year, but the Google Search box gives you an idea of how these custom search boxes will work.

When you create a Google Search Box (it is listed as the last option in the Box Types list), you’ll get a blank box with a search form inside. Just like with any other box type, you can add introductory text by clicking on the “add text” link. An example of this would be to provide instructions on searching, or some examples of search terms.

After performing a search (in admin mode) you will notice the “make this the default query” option at the beginning of search results. This enables you to define a default query whose results will appear in the search box when the user loads the page for the first time.

The box displays top 20 results from Google and at the bottom provides the link to Google Search page for more result matches.