Springshare Support Blog

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.

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

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

Several users have sent us emails in the last few days asking why their del.icio.us boxes, which used to work fine, are now only showing a very limited set of tags. After looking into the issue in depth, the conclusion is that - for now - we can’t do anything about this because it’s a problem with the del.icio.us api code. We get del.icio.us tags to display in LibGuides by using  the code provided by del.icio.us,  and that worked fine ever since we introduced the feature (we never changed the code) until this week when things suddenly stopped working properly.

Del.icio.us folks are clearly changing the code on their end, and it is our hope that this is only because they are gearing up for the launch of Del.icio.us v2, i.e. the new version and are just going thru some last minute reshuffling/changing of code and the API. There are many other people, unrelated to LibGuides, that are having the same problem (see http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/07/do-you-know-where-your-password-is.html#comment-24308 ).

So, we’ll just have to be a bit patient and see if they fix this soon because they know it’s a problem. If not, we will have to think of other ways to extract this information and show it inside LibGuides boxes. This will be a rather difficult to do  without the delicious code working properly.

 Stay tuned… We apologize for this problem, and wish that other web 2.0 services were as reliable as LibGuides

The growth of LibGuides has been nothing short of amazing, but the best part is that we are just getting started! New libraries are signing up every day, so the current statistics (300 libraries, 5000 librarians using the system, 11,500 guides created with 70,000 subject pages) will look like small potatoes 6 months from now. To ensure the smooth growth of our community, and to be able to handle the increasead load we are upgrading the LibGuides server infrastructure.

After we stopped drooling over the specs of the new servers (the latest dual quad-core Intel cpus, 4 gb of ram, powerful Cisco firewall, etc. - don’t want to bore you with all the details but trust us, they are awesome), we installed the servers at our data center, so the next step is to do a lot of testing, and finally to move all databases and systems from the old servers to the new ones.

There will be a planned 1 hour downtime during the actual system migration, tentatively scheduled between August 10th and August 15th. Five days before the migration, we will inform all local system admins about the exact date and time. This is just an advanced notice because you (sys admins) will also need to do something on your part to complete the upgrade - depending on the status of your custom domain mapping. This is very important, so please read carefully: 

• If your LibGuides system is not setup with the custom domain mapping (i.e. your system is on the domain something.libguides.com) you do not need to do anything on your end.
• If you have the custom domain mapping (i.e. your system is on something.yourdomain.edu/net/org) AND your IT  folks in charge of your domain have created a cname alias for your libguides domain you do not need to do anything on your end.
• If you have the custom domain mapping AND your IT folks in charge of your domain have created an A record for your libguides domain and pointed it to LibGuides servers IP, you will need to tell them to update the A domain record with the new IP (which we will give to you in an email informing you about the exact downtime date/time, 5 days before the upgrade). This change needs to happen either during our upgrade or after the upgrade - do not have them change the IP before the upgrade because then your system will not be reachable prior to the upgrade.

Hence, what you (libguides admins) should do now is contact the IT folks in charge of your domain and ask them if they created a cname alias or an A record for your custom LibGuides domain. Depending on their answer, read the previous paragraph again and act accordingly :) 

We do not anticipate moving the IPs again so once this change is completed you (and we) should be fine for the next few years at least. In order to ensure the smooth upgrade, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions - support {at} springshare dot com and we’ll quickly answer any questions or concerns.

All libguides admins will get an email 5 days before the upgrade with the timing of the downtime and the IP address which the IT folks on your end need to update if they created an A record for your domain.

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.