Springshare Support Blog

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.

Our tech guys have been busy cranking out code so we have another batch of new features to announce. They all come as a direct result of the suggestions and ideas from our customers, so keep up the great work and continue providing us constructive feedback.

The new features we are announcing today are:

1. Enhanced user profiles. The system administrators can now define up to 5 additional fields for user profiles. For example “What I do in the libraries”, “What I’m reading now”, “Favorite Website”, etc. (you get the idea). Creating these additional fields will enable you (the librarians) to provide a bit more information about yourself that may be interesting to patrons. Sys-admins can define these questions in the “Custom Fields” screen, under the System Settings tab.
   Once these optional questions are defined, they will show up in the Customize Profile screen for individual librarians
2. Friendly URLs that do not redirect in the user’s browser bar. Most of you know that you can define a “friendly URL” for your guides, but when the user typed the friendly URL in the browser bar, the system would redirect them to the real url, which ends with content.php?pid=xxxx. We have figured out a way to keep the friendly URLs in the user’s browser bar, without redirecting to the internal url. For example, check out http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/srop and notice that the friendly URL now stays in your browser bar.
3. Friendly URLs for profile pages. Just like you can define a friendly URL for your guides, now you can also define a friendly URL shortcut for your LibGuides profile pages. The format of the URL will be http://yourdomain/profile/shortcut. The shortcut is defined in the “Customize Profile” option on the main admin page.
   
   Check out an example of the profile shortcut http://demo.libguides.com/profile/slaven
4. The ability for guide owners to associate their guides with more than one category. You asked for it - we delivered.
5. The ability for guide owners to define more than 3 editors. Note that when you create a new guide the form still limits you to 3 editors, but then on the guide admin page, under “Add/change editors” drop-down option you can add as many more editors as you’d like.
6. Links and Lists content box type. We renamed “Web Links with more information” content box into “Links and Lists” and made the URLs optional, so now you can mix and match links with non-link items when creating lists.
7. Introduction of “Google Search Box” content box. This is an important new feature so we will do a separate blog post about it. In short, it enables your users to search Google directly from inside the content box. Also, you can define a “default search term” whose results will show inside the box when the user first loads the page.

Based on the feedback from our users, we have revamped the LibGuides community site. The URL is still the same - http://community.libguides.com so check it out when you have a moment.

Besides the cleaner look, we have added a new feature - “Browse Institutions” which enables you to filter and find institutions by State/Country, in addition to the old method of filtering institutions alphabetically. So, now you can find all LibGuides institutions in Florida, for example, as well as Canada, Australia, etc. (yes, we are growing world-wide)

Jump to the LibGuides Community Site. 

For those of you who use (popular micro-blogging platform) Twitter, we are happy to announce that you can now link to your feed right in your LibGuides profile.  All you need to do is add your Twitter username to your LibGuides profile, and we will automatically add an icon and link to your profile pages.

If you are already using Twitter, you can follow us at http://twitter.com/springshare, and be the first to know about new features we are working on, when updates are being released, what we had for lunch, etc.  We also plan to solicit feedback from our community members via Twitter, and use the site as a way to promote discussion between our members.

So if you are not currently using Twitter, or “just don’t get it”, now you have a reason to give it (another) try.  I would recommend starting out with the excellent “Twitter in Plain English” video from Common Craft, and then jump directly to Twitter and create your account!

Our Libraries have been asking us for more flexibility in arranging boxes on the homepage, and today we made a first step in this direction by releasing the Tag Cloud box homepage customization option. Now you can choose to display the Tag Cloud box at the top of middle column on the homepage (default option), or below the Featured/Popular Guides box, or you can decide to hide the Tag Cloud box altogether.

 This feature is available for sys admins, under the System Settings tab -> Customize Homepage

It is now possible to add content boxes in the profile column on your guides. This gives you more flexibility in  organizing your guide content. Note that the content boxes will appear below the profile box - the profile box is always at the top of the right column, unless the profile is hidden in which case the content boxes will appear on top. You can also move content boxes between the profile column and other two columns.

The third column content boxes capability is a welcome addition to LibGuides-as-a-website applications because it gives libraries the ability to fill the space below profile boxes with more useful content.

This is big! And exciting! We have added a new content box type, “Remote Script”, which enables those techies amongst you to embed external content right inside LibGuides boxes, in the same way that LibGuides displays rss feeds, for example. This means you can now write scripts (on your own server, in any programming language) to display any type of data, from any system, right inside the LibGuides box, without using iFrames or any other tricks. The content you display using your script will look just like any other LibGuides content. Pretty cool, huh? We thought so, too.

Best of all, since this “remote script” content box is just another box type in LibGuides, you can link to it, or copy it on any number of guides. For example, you can write a script that will pull the list of top databases from your library system, place that script inside the remote script content box and then link to that box on any other guide you (or others) create. Create-once-use-anywhere type of thing.

There are a few things to keep in mind when writing your scripts (these are also mentioned in the help screen when adding the remote script inside the content box):

1. Your content will be wrapped inside a div in the content box so make sure you properly close your divs. If you leave any divs open that could interfere with the rest of the boxes on the page.
2. You do not need to have <body>, <head>, and similar tags in your script - just output the content you want displayed inside the box.
3. Use absolute paths for any images and links inside your script. In other words, use href=yourdomain/yourpage.html instead of href=yourpage.html (the same is true for src= attributes).

We are very excited about this new addition to our content box options because it opens some pretty cool possibilities for mixing and matching outside content with the content in LibGuides, thus making LibGuides a true “one-stop-shop” so to speak, a place where your users can come and get information from many different sources/places (and ask you questions via your profile box if they are still confused).

A few LibGuides librarians (especially sys-admins) have asked us how they can see the list of all private / unpublished / published guides in the system. This information was available but it was in different places and not easily found, so we created a tab called “Guide Index”, which lists all guides in your system, filtered by the publication status. This tab is available from any admin page, including the main administrative page in LibGuides.

We have added a few new options in LibGuides for dealing with comments. As local LibGuides sites become more popular and replace Google and Wikipedia as *the* sources of reliable information (just kiddin’, but hey - nobody knows information better than librarians, so why not?) the issues with comment spam may become a problem so we have built in a few safeguards for LibGuides administrators to deal with this.

There are now 3 modes of Comments operation in LibGuides (these are available to System Administrators under System Settings -> System-wide customization):

1) Enabled comments means the visitors can post comments without the approval of the page owner (this is how comments worked so far). The page owner will get an email with the text of the comment, so they can log on and delete the comment if they deem it inappropriate. This option is set by default, with every new LibGuides system.

2) Moderated comments. When a visitor writes a comment, it is hidden until the page owner (or an editor, or an admin) manually approves the comment. The page owner still gets an email notification that a visitor wrote a comment, and they can also see the list of comments waiting to be approved when they log on to their guide. If there are any page (or box) comments the Comments link will look like this (with the number of comments waiting to be approved in red):

3) Lastly, the system administrator can disable all page and box comments system-wide. The previous comments that were posted are not deleted - they are just hidden, so if you re-enable the comments system-wide those comments will show up again.