Springshare Support Blog

Here are the most recent cummulative stats for the LibGuides community.

An important milestone was reached in the month of September - as a community, our members have now published over 100,000 pages of content within LibGuides!  Lucky page #100,000 can be found on Jeremy Cusker’s Operations Research and Information Engineering guide in the Cornell University LibGuides system.

I should also mention that the number of unique visitors to LibGuides more than tripled from August to September, and our total page views peaked at over 8 million for the month!  Its safe to say that school is definitely back in session, and the popularity of LibGuides is really taking off!

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.

The Springshare Team would like to announce that HowStuffWorks.com, the Web site famous for its easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works, will be working with the LibGuides product as our first content partner.  HowStuffWorks will create free multimedia “Hot Topic” Guides for library users of all ages.  The HowStuffWorks portfolio of Guides is already available at http://hsw.libguides.com for:

• Animals - http://hsw.libguides.com/animals-guide
• Earth Science - http://hsw.libguides.com/earthscience-guide
• Geography & Maps - http://hsw.libguides.com/geography-maps-guide
• US History - http://hsw.libguides.com/ushistory-guide
• Life Science - http://hsw.libguides.com/lifescience-guide
• Physical Science - http://hsw.libguides.com/physicalscience-guide
• Economics - http://hsw.libguides.com/economics-guide
• Dinosaurs - http://hsw.libguides.com/dinosaurs
• Elections & Politics - http://hsw.libguides.com/elections-politics-guide
• Green Living - http://hsw.libguides.com/green-living-guide
• Technology & Everyday Science - http://hsw.libguides.com/technology-guide

HowStuffWorks is developing even more guides slated to be available in Fall 2008 including:

• World History
• Government & Politics
• Weather &  Natural Disasters
• Home Improvement / DIY
• Gardening
• Recipes
• Cooking 101
• Auto Repair
• Space & Solar System
• Classic Cars
• Adventure
• Travel
• Small Business
• Health & Fitness

The guides have been created by Kristiana Burk, a former librarian and teacher who holds an ALA-accredited MLS from the University of Kentucky. She is currently Channel Director at HowStuffWorks and welcomes any ideas or requests for more information at kburk@howstuffworks.com.  Librarians and subscribers to LibGuides are encouraged to copy HowStuffWorks guides in their entirety, enhance the template guides with their own programming and resources or pull certain articles and video links from them to create their own customized guide on a given topic.  Enjoy!

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.

Here are the most recent cummulative stats for the LibGuides community; over 20,000 content pages were added last month!

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! 

After our server upgrade went as smoothly as possible (zero downtime for patrons), we were alerted today that several (5, to be exact) of our clients were not able to access the new servers. After scratching our heads and looking at the problem from every possible angle (I’d like to thank our clients who worked with us on figuring it out), one of our genius techies (i.e. not me) said “it must be the bogon issue - their network administrators should check their bogon filters for the 174.*.*.* address. This network was only recently opened up by IANA. Bogon filters are filters designed to remove bogus IP addresses from being routed or spoofed. This is now a valid network and should not be filtered” (for more info, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogon_filtering)

And – sure enough – our new servers are on 174.* network and hence the reason why any network with obsolete bogon filter rules had problems accessing them. Even though this was not a LibGuides server issue (nor LibGuides problem in general) we are still bummed out that these 5 clients had their LibGuides access interrupted for part of the day, and we apologize for this - if we could have fixed it immediately we would, but this was out of our hands.

So, this should be a lesson to every network admin out there - keep those network rules and bogon filters up to date - because these obsolete filters not only prevent you from accessing LibGuides, but also from accessing many other (valid) sites who happen to be on this newly-approved 174.* network. The good news is that 98% of our client sites already had these bogon filters updated, but we want to help these 2% get on the train as well

If you are having problems accessing LibGuides, have your IT folks check the bogon filters for 174.* range - this is most likely the culprit.

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.