Springshare Support Blog

Widgets are the unsung heroes of LibGuides. They are a great way to embed your LibGuides into blogs, course management systems, social networks, etc.

We’ve made an enhancement to the statistics package in LibGuides to enable you to track the number of visits to your guides from widgets. In other words, when you look at the statistics for an individual guide, you will be able to see how many visits came from the widget (as well as from the forthcoming API calls). See the screenshot below.

Many of you have come to rely on the LibGuides Rich Text Editor for entering content into your guides. The rich text editor is neat because it provides an easy way for non-techie people to create beautiful html text that looks really nice on your guides.

However, some of our power users have experienced a few issues with the rich text editor in that they find the editor sometimes changes some of their manually entered html tags and javascript code. Namely, the text editor ”cleans up” the code, i.e. it makes sure that the code and tags entered are standards-compliant html. For all practical purposes this is a good thing because your html code should be standards compliant and have proper attributes, as defined by the W3C consortium.  But, sometimes, in order to make scripts work right (especially for javascript and forms) you don’t want LibGuides rich text editor correcting your code. Plain Text Editor to the rescue!

When you want to enter the html code/forms/javascript yourself and don’t need the rich text editor, click on the “switch to plain text editor” link which is now part of the rich text editor popup. See the screenshot below.

We released the first batch of useful utilities for LibGuides System Administrators. When you (the sys admin) log on to the main admin screen, you will notice a new option at the bottom - “Admin Toolbox” (see photo below).

The first 3 functions to be released are:

• Display Emails of All Users - this function enables you to get a comma-delimited list of registered email account holders, so that you can easily paste this list into your email application. Handy for sending a bulk email notice to your users.
• Change Guide Owner - when you need to switch owners for a particular guide.
• Global Search and Replace (for Database URL changes) - this is a very powerful function so use with caution. It enables system administrators to perform a global search and replace for links in the system. The function is useful for changing the URL of databases in the system, for example. Note that the search and replace is only done for links contained in Simple Links and Info Links content boxes.

We will be adding more of these useful sys-admin functions so let us know what you’d like to see in there.

Many of our LibGuides users have come to depend on the rich text editor functionality when creating content in LibGuides. The flexibility it offers when creating html formatted text and forms is great, but there were some minor browser compatibility issues present. Today we upgraded the LibGuides rich text editor to the latest and greatest version and our tests indicate this version is much improved in terms of browser compatibility and support. It also loads faster inside the browser!

In addition to better browser support and faster loading, the new version offers more flexibility in customizing the text and html attributes. You can now customize the css elements, individual text attributes and even pick text and background colors using the color chooser. Very cool! Check out the screenshot below and give the editor a try. As always, please let us know what you think.

We recently came across a post from Sara at the world famous Tactless Librarian blog, that presents an interesting use for LibGuides.  Sara has been creating research guides for course-specific instruction sessions held at the library.  These “class shortcut pages” contain all the information presented during the instruction session, including reference tools, polls, and of course links to those expensive subscription databases:

“One database, Literary Reference Center, got 80 hits that month from my LibGuide alone.  If I had done my typical session the students would have forgotten the database and gone to Academic Search Premier because it was the first on our  list of databases.”

To help promote these instruction sessions Sara has been providing faculty with links to specific shortcut pages, which are then embedded into the campus courseware system.  In addition to reinforcing the lessons learned during the instruction session, this also creates an excellent integration point for the library’s online reference program:

“The guide solved a variety of problems.  First, it allowed us to link to a Meebo chat … with the librarian who made the guide if they put a Meebo box in.  Any guide made with our reference account gets the Ask A Librarian box because it’s on that profile.”

It is great to see librarians finding new ways to use LibGuides, and Sara’s approach to course-specific research guides is definitely one worth mentioning.  You can read her original post, as well as leave your own comments and questions, at
http://www.librarygirl.org/wordpress/archives/97.

Thanks to a recent software update from Mr. Jobs and the rest of the brilliant minds at Apple, iPhone users are now able to add custom icons to their homescreen.  To add a nice and shiny LibGuides icon to your nice and shiny iPhone, follow these simple steps:

1) Open up your Safari browser on the iPhone and browse to your LibGuides website, for example http://demo.libguides.com.

2) Tap the plus (+) icon towards the bottom of the Safari window and then the “Add to Home Screen” button when prompted.

3) Enter a name for your new icon - we suggest “LibGuides” because its the right length - and tap the “Add” button at the top-right of the screen.

When you return to your Home Screen you will see a LibGuides icon, that when tapped, takes you directly to your LibGuides site!  Enjoy!

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!

The process of configuring LibGuides to search your library catalog can be a little tricky.  Here is a step-by-step guide to assist you with the process:

1) Start off by browsing to your library website and locating your catalog search page.

2) Set any search preferences that you would like to use, and enter a simple search term into the search box.  For this example, we will use the word “hamburger” as our search string.  Once your search string has been entered, click the provided button to submit your search.

3) The next screen you see should be your search results page.  Copy the URL from the address bar, open your favorite text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, MS Word), and paste the URL into a new document.  This will allow us to easily view and edit the URL in the upcoming steps.

 4) Look at your URL, and try to locate the search term that you provided in step #2.  When you have found the term, replace it with the word {search}, leaving all the surrounding text intact.  Here is a before and after example of what the URLs may look like:

BEFORE:
http://catalog.springshare.com?action=find&results=5&qval=hamburger&bool=true

AFTER:
http://catalog.springshare.com?action=find&results=5&qval={search}&bool=true

*Note - if your URL did not contain your search term, please contact us at support@springshare.com for assistance.

5) Copy the updated URL containing the {search} placeholder, and then login to your LibGuides system using an account with administrator access.  Click on the “System Settings” tab and look for an entry labelled “Catalog Search URL”.  Click in the space provided, paste your new URL into the box, and click the “Save” button to save your changes.

6) Once the new URL has been provided, you can test the catalog search feature from any of the search boxes provided within LibGuides.

Some catalog vendors include session or request information in the search URL to help keep track of each search that is submitted.  In some cases this can cause problems when trying to search from within LibGuides.  If you followed the steps above, and are still running into problems configuring your system, please let us know and we will be happy to help you troubleshoot!

We have added several important new features to LibGuides recently. Among them is the full integration with Del.icio.us - a popular tagging and social bookmarking service. Librarians can quickly and easily add their del.icio.us tag cloud to LibGuides using a “Del.icio.us Tag Cloud Content Box”.

Simply enter your del.icio.us username and tell LibGuides how you want your tags displayed (see below)

With a few clicks, you get your shiny del.icio.us tag cloud displayed on the LibGuides page.

The integration goes both ways - every visitor to LibGuides can save and share their favorite guides on Del.icio.us, but also on Facebook, LibMarks, or send an email with the Guide link to a friend:

Visitors to any Guide will find the “share or email” link next to the Guide Title - it is a folder icon displayed right next to the title of the Guide.