Springshare Support Blog

If you noticed a lack of code updates for LibAnswers in the past couple of months, that was just the quiet before the storm because we are excited thrilled to announce a major LibAnswers code update which went live last night. There are lots of little fixes in this update but the biggest changes are:

1. Mobile version of LibAnswers. It’s here. And it looks awesome! Just like with LibGuides, the system will auto-detect when the user is accessing LibAnswers from a mobile device and serve mobile-friendly pages. You have to try it out. The Auto-suggest feature works great, and the question submissions via mobile are enabled as well. Here’s an added bonus – now your patrons can send you SMS questions just by clicking on your local SMS phone number – how cool is that?! You do have to have our SMS module for this SMS functionality to work – those of you that don’t have it, what are you waiting for?
   In general, the mobile version of LibAnswers is looking great, working great, and we look forward to hearing your suggestions and ideas for making it even better!
2. Multi-lingual interface for public pages. We have worked with several of our international clients (in Sweden and France) to translate the public screens in LibAnswers and we’re pleased to be able to offer a multi-lingual interface for LibAnswers public pages. If you are interested in translating your LibAnswers system into your local language, please email us at our standard springshare support email and we will send you the translation files.
3. We also made many behind-the-scenes improvements in the code and in the database so the system is now faster than ever!

Big thank you to all our clients who contributed ideas which went into this update, and also thanks to Derik and the LibAnswers team who made it all happen! As always, we’re here if any questions pop up, and please continue sending us your ideas and suggestions for further improving LibAnswers.

The theme for our October newsletter is “mobile”! As a premier provider of useful (and cool) web apps for libraries we want to make sure we got your mobile needs covered as well. We released the mobile version of LibGuides, and the reviews have been uniformly great. We did not dive head first into mobile to get something out quickly – instead we carefully designed the mobile version from the ground up and it seems everybody loves it, which is music to our ears.

In fact, we are really excited that you are excited about LibGuides mobile, as this means everybody is going to love our upcoming mobile website builder tool! Creating mobile websites will be as easy and as fun as creating guides. We are putting the finishing touches on this new tool/module and will release it by year-end. The LibAnswers mobile interface is just about done and will be out by the end of the month.

The Newsletter also features an informative interview with the librarians at Johnson & Wales University Rhode Island Campus. They are doing some wonderful things with the LibAnswers SMS Module, and as a result their SMS Reference service is racking up huge usage numbers. No wonder Rosie (Dean of University Libraries) and her team are also known as the rock stars on campus!  Great job Rosie, keep it up.

Going forward, each edition of the newsletter will feature an interview with an existing Springshare customer who will share their advice, and tips and tricks from the field about how they are making a real difference in their community by using Springshare tools and apps…

Read the complete newsletter at http://help.springshare.com/news-Oct10

Over the weekend we successfully completed another major code update (without any system downtime – kudos to our tech team!) and rolled out many new features. Watch for the full details of all new features in our upcoming October newsletter, but here is the summary:

LibGuides/CampusGuides:

1. Mobile interface for your guides! The system auto-detects mobile devices and serves the mobile version. It’s pretty cool, check it out. Also, we don’t want to let the cat out of the bag too soon, but watch for a super-major announcement in a few weeks – a cool new tool which lets libraries easily build mobile websites. The process will be as easy and as fun as creating guides!
2. Including non-LibGuides guides in the LibGuides index. Now you can create “placeholder” guides in the system which can point to non-LibGuides pages, and display those pages alongside your LibGuides/CampusGuides content. Say you have a page which you want to make accessible/searchable from LibGuides. Now, you can place that page’s URL in your system, assign it all the standard LibGuides markup (title/description/tags/subject categories/etc.), and display it alongside your LibGuides/CampusGuides. This way your LibGuides/CampusGuides can aggregate *all* research and guide-related content at the library. The potential of this is far-reaching, to say the least!
3. Unique CSS class for each box type. Now you can customize the look and feel of individual box types to your heart’s content.
4. Folder support for E-Reserves (CampusGuides-only).
5. More streamlined way to import your course lists into E-Reserves module (CampusGuides-only). We can help you import your course lists into our E-Reserves module simply by populating a simple Excel spreadsheet.
6. Updated Asset Management screen (now includes “Books from the Catalog”) and Guide Index screen (more/better filtering options for finding guides).
7. Custom Homepage Redirect – now you can assign a custom guide to act as your LibGuides/CampusGuides homepage (rather than the system default) by using the “Custom Homepage Redirect” option in your Customize Homepage screen.

LibAnswers:

1. Keywords for enhanced searching/better auto-suggest matches. Now you can include up to 5 keywords with each Q&A pair. These are hidden fields (for the patron) but they will greatly enhance searching/finding answers).
2. Much improved SMS Module. It now includes “Send a follow-up” option for librarian to send a follow-up message to the patron, to make sure their question has been answered. We  also have new and improved SMS Statistics with detailed charts for auto-responders, keyword-responses, turnaround time, “direct messages”, and more!
3. The new LibAnswers html widget. Fully customizable html widget which can be embedded into any webpage, to make searching the knowledge base available from anywhere – literally.
4. The Reference Analytics module can now track up to 10 fields (up from 6) and each field can have up to 30 values (vs 25 in the old version)
5. Librarians can record Analytics information right on the “answer” page, without having to be redirected to the Analytics module screens. This makes recording analytics a snap!
6. Improved Statistics screens – more charts and graphs, more statistics options, and the ability to filter statistics range by day (as opposed to monthly statistics in the old version).
7. You can now use the handy “Edit Answer” link on the public question/answer screen to edit/update questions (rather than searching for the question in the Admin interface).

There are many other ”small improvements and fixes” for both products, but we wanted to give you the heads-up on the most important changes in this post. The full details will follow in our Newsletter next month.

Many of these new features were developed as a direct result of your suggestions and feedback, so here’s a big THANKS to everyone who contributed ideas and helped with testing. Please let us know what you think!

Our client libraries will really like this new thing we’re doing – namely, we have started creating marketing/advertising/pr materials to help our clients promote the wonderful things they are doing with our products – LibAnswers, LibGuides, and CampusGuides.

The first marketing/advertising “how to” we put together is for LibAnswers - http://help.springshare.com/advertisingsms. It’s full of great ideas and practical advice about how to encourage patrons to use your LibAnswers SMS service – things like tear-away flyers with your SMS number, business card stickers, adding your SMS number to your databases, using keywords in classroom instruction, etc. There are many *free* templates you can download and customize for use within your library.

http://help.springshare.com/advertisingsms. Use it, and don’t lose it!

If you don’t have our SMS/Texting module for LibAnswers, check out what you’re missing:

LibAnswers SMS/Texting Module

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July and August are (we’re told) the “Dog Days” of summer – apparently for some, the heat and humidity of the season is supposed to cause stagnation and inactivity. Frankly, we think it’s a bunch of hooey – librarians are as busy as ever, and so are we! So while some folks are out there are wasting afternoons on front porches, sipping iced tea and fanning sweat from their brows, we’ve spent our “summer vacation” thinking up some really cool new features. Hold on to your wide-brimmed hats and prepare to be blown away!

To start off with a bang, we have two exciting additions to CampusGuides/CommunityGuides to annouce:

• Our Assessment Tool is ready for prime-time! You can now integrate surveys and quizzes directly into your guides – collect formal feedback from your users about your programs and services, website, guides, or… anything else you can think of – and get tallied reports on user responses right in the system! As an added bonus, any survey created in Campus/CommunityGuides can be linked anywhere outside of the system – just embed the unique survey URL and get instant feedback from your users from anywhere! Best of all, the assessment tool comes standard for all Campus/CommunityGuides systems!
• Academic Libraries will freak out about our new E-Reserves module! This optional module allows you to securely integrate reserve materials directly into your CampusGuides system, and will allow your students to access reserve materials right alongside your course and research guides. This module truly makes CampusGuides a one-stop-shop for all library-related research needs – and did we mention that the E-Reserves module costs orders of magnitude less than your current e-reserve solution? It’s true – ask us, and you’ll see for yourself!

We’ve also got quite a few upgrades and changes to the existing LibGuides/CampusGuides interface:

• Resource Icons – This new functionality integrates custom icons alongside your database/resource links (without having to hack your links with img tags). You can create a standard set of “meaningful” icons and easily deploy them across your resources. Create icons to represent trial databases, offsite/home-accessible resources, recommended resources, or any other info you want to convey to your users, and integrate them with your database links through a simple check-box!
• A-Z database import tool (for Serials Solutions clients) – We’ve added new options to the import tool – now, you can “check-all”, “uncheck-all”, and “restore defaults”. We’ve also updated the tool and made it easier to maintain any custom database descriptions you create in LibGuides – now, blank descriptions in SS won’t overwrite descriptions in LG, and you can use our new checkbox option to prevent description updates in subsequent imports.
• Librarian Profiles have seen a number of upgrades, including an improved layout to the profile page, a new “LinkedIn” field, and better CSS customization options
• The API now offers more layout control on subject links, and options to return guides sorted by popularity or publication date
• We’ve updated the Rich Text Editor to a more recent version of TinyMCE, which should fix the issue of stripped FORM tags when using IE

LibAnswers has also received a number of improvements:

• Statistics including segmentation between private and staff-entered questions, and now offer statistics on questions transferred between systems
• Export (to excel/CSV format) is available for data in the Reports Wizard / Knowledge Base Explorer
• Filtering options – the “words” filter in the “My Home” tabs now search the answer as well as the question. You’ll also see new pagination links on many administrative pages
• Email notification options – you can now send system emails via SMTP, and librarians can create unique email signatures through their LibAnswers profile. Librarians can also create an “Address Book” for storing non-account holder emails
• New LibAnswers users can login via their LibGuides account, which will automatically generate a LibAnswers account

Frankly, there are too many things to tell you about in just one blog post – so if you want more information, grab an iced beverage and check out this month’s edition of Springy News!

We came back from ALA in D.C. full of ideas for new features for our products. We’ve already coded a bunch of new stuff for LibAnswers (the LibGuides/CampusGuides update is coming soon as well) and here are the new features we just rolled out:

1. Importing of LibGuides accounts into LibAnswers. It’s true – it’s here and it is not even Christmas yet! Now our libraries who have both LibGuides/CampusGuides and LibAnswers can import their LibGuides user accounts into LibAnswers.
2. Improved accessibility for public pages. We’ve taken a big step towards making the system 100% compliant in terms of accessibility on all public pages (properly organized and nested headers, alt tags on images, title tags on links, “skip to content” links for screen readers, improved form labeling, and more…)
3. RSS feeds for new answers and answers by topic. This is a biggie – note the orange RSS icon on the homepage and on every topic page. You can take these RSS feeds and embed the questions/answers from the system anywhere (including LibGuides/CampusGuides, of course!)
4. The notification emails (when patron submits a new question) now include the demographic information about the patron (if provided).
5. Better email notifications when transferring/emailing a question to another librarian to answer.
6. Custom email signatures and more email options for answering questions. When an individual librarian is answering a question and an email gets sent to the patron, they can include a custom email signature (defined in the Edit Profile screen). System admins can also decide whether outgoing emails have the “From” line of the individual librarian answering the question, or whether the email comes from the general system-wide account.
7. SMS Questions/Answers: the ability to see the previous message exchanges with the same user.
8. Reference Analytics module: improved Visual Data Analyzer filtering – you can now filter data and create graphs in the Visual Data Analyzer for individual librarians (filter data by user).

There you have it. The best web 2.0 reference tool just got a whole lot better. As always, we thank all our users who submitted the ideas and we look forward to hearing more of the good stuff which we will then turn into new features.

Enjoy and let us know if any questions pop up – support@springshare.com

We are pleased to announce a first major update of the SMS Module for LibAnswers. Our SMS Module clients now have these 3 exciting new functions available to them:

1. Send an SMS.
   You can now send direct SMS messages to patrons from LibAnswers (i.e. not just reply to a text message sent by a patron but also initiate a text message as well). On the My Admin screen click on the “Send SMS” link, per below:

   
   This opens up many new opportunities in utilizing the SMS module functionality. Here are several scenarios for when this new feature comes in really handy:

   For example, if a reference librarian is helping a patron at a reference desk but needs more time to complete the research, they can send an SMS message to the patron when done – while the patron is somewhere else in the library, e.g. studying or browsing the stacks. TXTing them is less intrusive than a phone call yet more timely than an email – an ideal use for the new “Send an SMS” feature in LibAnswers.

   Librarians can also use this new feature to notify patrons when a book or an interlibrary loan they requested arrives. Another neat use scenario is the following – say a patron is at a reference desk asking for a specific item – rather than taking a printout with the information about the article/book/whatever the librarian can simply TXT the information to the patron so they will have it with them in their phone for easy access.

   These are just a few exciting ideas on how to use the new “Send an SMS” feature to make the communication and interaction with patrons more effective!

2. SMS auto-response keywords.
   This is just too cool. Imagine texting “hours” and getting an automatic response with the library’s working hours. Or texting “summer reads” and immediately getting back a list of fun summer reading recommendations compiled by librarians. How about texting “new dvds” to get the list of new dvd arrivals?

   Our new SMS keywords feature makes all this possible. With it you are able to define any number of SMS “keywords” and when patrons text that keyword to your local LibAnswers SMS number they get an instant auto-response that you defined. Pretty awesome, right? We thought so too! The possibilities for this feature are truly endless. You can get as creative as you want in getting timely and useful information to patrons. It’s an ideal tool for conducting marketing campaigns in your library.

   
   

   You can define as many keywords as  you want, and each keyword can have a response of up to 300 characters (e.g. two sms messages of 150 characters each). The keywords are not case sensitive, so if you define “Hours”, it will work just as good as “hours” or “HOURS”.

   Besides the examples mentioned above (“hours”, “new dvds”, “summer reads”) here are a few more ideas to get started with the keywords feature for your library:

   - For libraries with multiple branches or multi-library campuses text the library name for hours of each location.
   -”Directions” for the directions of how to get to the library.
   -”Book club” for the book club meeting times/locations.
   -”Events” for the listing of events at the library for any given week/month.
   -”New arrivals” to get the list of new arrivals.
   -”Keywords” – an automatic message with all the available keywords you defined!

   As you can see, we are super-excited about this SMS Automatic keywords feature and we hope we were able to pass some of that excitement on to you because your library marketing and patron communication can take a big leap forward with this new feature.

   The SMS keywords are set up in the System Settings tab, under the “SMS Module setup” submenu.

3. Ability to define “off-hours” autoresponders for each day of the week.
   This is not an entirely new feature but an enhancement of the existing one. Previously, you were able to define “off-hours” auto-responders (i.e. if someone sends an SMS question at 2am, you are able to define the off-hours automatic response) but you were limited in defining one for the weekdays and one for the weekends. This worked well if your hours are the same for Mon-Fri, and then for Sat-Sun, but if you had different hours on Fri than on Mon-Thu (for example) it didn’t quite work for you. So, we re-coded this feature to let you define the hours of operation for every day of the week separately. If you had the auto-response times defined previously please go back to them and redefine them for each day.

   These are customized in the System Settings tab, under the “SMS Module setup” submenu.

As always, let us know what you think (support@springshare.com) and if you have your own ideas on how to make the LibAnswers and SMS module work even better, please let us know – we’re all ears when it comes to this stuff!

As some of you have surely noticed by now, we released some pretty significant updates to LibGuides, LibAnswers and CampusGuides over the last weekend.  These updates represent several months of work from our talented tech team, along with dozens of suggestions from our LG / LA / CG user communities!  As you will see, there is a lot to review, so lets get started!

LibGuides

• The LibGuides text editor now allows you to toggle between rich and plain text modes without first needing to save your work. We also added a “Save Changes” button so you can save your text without closing the editor, as well as a status area that lets you know when you have pending changes that need to be saved.
• You can now change the order of sub-pages manually, so there is no longer a need to add numeric prefixes to the sub-page names in order to control the page order.  When reusing a page, you can also choose to make it a top-level page or a sub-page right from the Reuse Page screen.
• When creating a new link, book, or event you can now decide if that item will open in a new window or the same window on an item-by-item basis.  Any item that does not have its own custom “target” will use the default specified on the System Settings page.
• We have added a new “User Profile” content box type that will allow you to embed a LibGuides user profile box in any column, at any position, within your guide.
• Enhanced User Profile pages give you the ability to add your office hours, as well as additional custom content by creating one rich text box and one links box.  You may also disable your LibGuides profile page if you would prefer to not have it be visible to the public.
• We have also added a dedicated Facebook URL field to the profiles, so that you can easily link to your Facebook profile or library’s page within your profile.
• The new Collaborator feature allows you to co-create a guide with a person who does not have their own LibGuides account.  A guide Collaborator has rights to create and edit content on just a single guide in the system, allowing them to assist you with the content creation without having access to other guides or the admin areas of the system.
• When reusing links, you are now able to customize the “description” and “more information” fields, so you can tailor the link information to each specific guide.
• With the new “Links to Guides” content box type you can create a box that allows you to browse by subject/librarian, view all published guides in the system, browse by most popular guides, most recent guides, etc.
• LibGuides pages now have a visibility setting, allowing you to remove entire pages from the public view with a single click.
• All cover art from Syndetics is now retrieved at the highest possible resolution, and scaled down accordingly, to ensure the highest quality for all cover art images.
• We updated our code so that Google Analytics will pick up link hits in Links & Lists and Simple Web Links boxes! All you need to do is add the Google Analytics tracking code in the Custom <HEAD> Code box on the System-wide Settings page. Your link hits will then show up in the “Content” report in the GA console.
• You can now search for content within a Private Guide, assuming you are already on that guide and use the “This Guide” option in the search drop-down menu.  We also added a “view homepage” link to each of the results on the search results screen, so you can easily jump to any guide homepage right from the search results.

LibAnswers

• LibAnswers now supports SMS/Texting through our new SMS reference module!  Best of all, this new module will be FREE for the first year, with rock bottom prices afterwards. It is really, really affordable (There is a 1-time start up cost, but other than that it’s totally free for the first year). No cellphone required!
• The LibAnswers Homepage is now much more customizable. You can control the page layout (1 or 2 columns), column width, and use new box types.
• Previously, when you marked a question as “private”, it was deleted from the system as soon as you answered it. Now, they are kept in the system separate from public answers.  There is also a new system-wide option to set all questions as private by default.
• The Manage Topics screen has been redesigned to allow you to see the number of questions under each topic and edit the questions directly from that screen.  When you create a new topic on the Answer screen, that question is automatically assigned to that new topic.
• You can now send an update email to the person who asked a question by simply clicking a check box when updating a question in LibAnswers.
• When you delete users, you must first reassign all of their answers. Until now, you had to contact us to do that…but now it’s built into the process!
• In the Unanswered/Answered/Private tabs, you will notice many filtering options for the list of questions. You can filter by status, by answerer, by date, topic, etc. to help you find the questions you are looking for.
• You can now transfer unanswered questions between LibAnswers systems, allowing for even more collaboration between libraries and branches.
• Admins are now able to customize the default text of the “Ask Us” box.
• When emailing a user in your system about an unanswered/unclaimed question, you can now assign it to that user.  Admins can now unclaim any unanswered question in the system – no matter who’s claimed it.
• Topics can no longer be assigned to the same question/answer twice.

CampusGuides & CommunityGuides

• All the features mentioned in the LibGuides section above, plus…
• You can now feature guides on group homepages, just like on your general CampusGuides / CommunityGuides homepage.
• Group filtering has been added to the API – you can now create lists of guides assigned to groups that contain a certain term or groups with the exact name you enter.
• You can display all the guides from a specific group within the Links to Guides content box via a drop-down menu option.
• You can now choose to have your group inherit the HEAD / Header / Footer code from the System Settings page, as well as specify your own custom HEAD / Header / Footer code for each group.

If you would like further information about any of these features, or have some ideas you would like to see added to our applications, please let us know at support@springshare.com.  Thanks!

Big, really big, huge news! We are super excited to unveil the SMS reference module for our LibAnswers platform. R U Serious? Yep, you heard it right – LibAnswers is now the only reference system to aggregate asking reference questions from the Web, from Twitter and via SMS, with an extensive reporting capability to boot. If you thought the news couldn’t get any better, get this – the SMS Reference module for LibAnswers is FREE  for the first year, with rock-bottom prices afterwards. Check out these features:

• Each library is assigned a dedicated local phone number. Whoa, that’s cool – no short codes to remember or special keywords for patrons to memorize. We have big plans for further development of mobile and voice apps for libraries, and having a dedicated local number provides the platform to build exciting mobile and voice apps on top of it. Folks, we’re just getting started!
• The SMS capability is fully integrated into the current LibAnswers workflow. Any incoming SMS messages go to the Unanswered tab (email and IM notifications work for SMS, too). You answer SMS questions in the same way you currently answer any other LibAnswers questions. You can collaborate on answers, claim questions, release claims, pass notes, see who answered which SMS, etc.
• SMS statistics are fully integrated with LibAnswers stats. Want to see the monthly/daily/hourly distribution of SMS questions? Want to compare SMS stats with Twitter stats or Web reference stats? We provide a variety of reports on SMS reference usage. Furthermore, with the Analytics module for LibAnswers you can go even deeper and analyze the reference trends and staffing needs for each reference channel – an essential tool for evaluating and improving your reference service.
• LibAnswers widgets, which you can embed into any web page on your library site (and beyond – put them on blogs, courseware pages, etc) to advertise your SMS reference number, with the ability to ask reference questions from any widget. These widgets are a great marketing tool for your SMS reference.
• Auto-responders for those times when you are not available.
• Unlimited number of simultaneous logins. All your librarians can have an account in LibAnswers and answer SMS questions. There are no limits to the number of accounts or the number of users logged on at the same time.
• Fully hosted solution. You get your own local phone number without having to buy (and tote around) a dedicated phone just for SMS. Plus, all your data lives in a cloud (nine) which means we take care of the back-end infrastructure for you.
• Pricing - FREE for the first year, save for a one-time setup fee of $149. You get 400 messages per month (incoming + outgoing) and you can carry over any unused credits from month-to-month, during your annual license term (hello, AT&T)! This means you have 4,800 FREE messages for your first year.
• Ongoing charges - After the free first year, choose between the following plans:
  

  $30/month	600 messages/month, i.e. 7,200/year (incoming + outgoing)
  $50/month	1,200 messages/month, i.e. 14,400/year (incoming + outgoing)

  You can carry any unused credits from month to month for the full year. Need more message credits? Sure, buy a pack of 1,000 for just $50. If you anticipate needing more than 15K messages a year, talk to us and we will give you an even better deal!

There you have it –  a simple and affordable way to offer SMS reference, all part of the fully-featured web 2.0 reference platform for libraries. Web Questions, Twitter Questions, SMS Questions – we’ve got them all covered. In-depth statistics and analytics for any reference channel? Check. Automatic Q-and-A knowledgebase and FAQ builder? Check.  A complete reference platform, priced orders of magnitude less than paying for separate reference tools? Double check!

Pardon our enthusiasm, but this is disruptive, revolutionary, and very exciting at the same time.

Email us at sales@springshare.com and we’ll help you get started on LibAnswers and SMS reference.

We rolled out the initial (beta) release of the LibAnswers/Instant Messanger integration, so please check it out. Log on to your main LibAnswers admin page (My Admin) and under System Settings tab select “IM Notifications” option. This is where you can setup the integration (you must have a valid GTalk account to do this, but you can use any IM aggregator, e.g. Meebo, Digsby, etc. to receive IM notifications).

Once you set this up, any time a new question, or a new comment is submitted to your LibAnswers system you will get an Instant Message notification (in addition to the email notification which is still there).

Let us know what you think – this is only the first release of this IM integration and we’d like to improve on it based on your feedback.