Here’s the first iteration of the LibGuides home page – thanks to Michael Stephens for sharing this image!

The admin page, circa 2008 – thanks to Kelly Smith at Eastern Kentucky University for this one!

And we saved the best for last – an old 404 message, shared by Elizabeth Brixton. Just so you know, it’s really Slaven’s fault.

We’ve come a long way in 5 years – from one guide to almost 250,000 (whoa!), and from a handful of librarians to over 44,000 (double-whoa!). Many thanks to all of you for being part of the Springy community – you guys never cease to amaze, educate, and delight us. And wow, time really does fly when you’re having fun!

The best part of Best Of? We’ve already contacted the original guide authors and asked them if they’re willing to share their awesome content, so you’re free to copy any featured guide into your own site and reuse / remix it to your hearts content!

This week, we’ve added a new group of awesome guides to Health & Wellness Resources. These guides were compiled by the experts at Eugene Public Library and Berkeley Public Library, & showcase resources that cover everything from Fitness & Exercise to Nutrition, and from Alternative & Complimentary Medicine to Men’s & Women’s Health. Check them out – they’re sure to put a spring in your step!

We’re always looking for new guides to feature in Best Of. If you’ve created or know of a guide that makes you go “Whoa, that’s awesome!”, let us know!

This is what we’re looking for: 

• LAMP skills of the ninja caliber, including 3+ years PHP / MySQL experience and Unix / Apache skills
• Experience in scaling web infrastructure
• Front-end JS programming experience (e.g. jQuery or dojo)
• Bonus Round: worked with Nginx, Mobile tech, or Solr? Experience with any of these is a plus. Worked with all three? Where have you been all our lives??
• You need to be a self-starter and self-motivating type. We work in a typical startup fashion so you’ll be wearing many hats and doing a lot of things – at once – hence having great organizational and multitasking skills is essential.

In a typical week, you’ll:

• Create front- and back-end interfaces for new or existing products, letting your creative juices run free
• Work with our partners (other library-centric companies) to integrate their tools with Springy and vice versa
• Dream up new ideas that will rock the library (software) world
• Every one us (including our mad genius CEO) also helps with support and making sure our customers’ needs are taken care of, so you’ll be talking with our customers regularly, troubleshooting bug fixes and such

We offer:

• Great pay and benefits (health, dental, 401K, etc.)
• Very flexible vacations/time off policy
• Working from home (yes, you heard it right, though slackers need not apply – see the point above about needing to be a self-starter and self-motivator)
• A very supportive, library-centric environment (half of our team is librarians).

If this sounds like your dream gig, please send your resume to sarah@springshare.com and let us know what makes you awesome.

New in LibAnswers:

• SMS now available in Canada and the UK! Picture it: a text messaging service that’s directly tied in to your LibAnswers workflow. Send and receive SMS messages, create auto-responders, and enjoy a wealth of statistics – all from one centralized interface. We’re thrilled to extend this service to our clients in Canada and the UK – to get started, email sales@springshare.com!
• Keyword Improvements – Adding keywords helps your users discover relevant public questions in your system. This feature now supports key-phrases – aka keywords that have spaces. We’ve also added an auto-suggest feature, to help you discover keywords and phrases you’ve used previously. Yay for easy!
• Customizable Search Results Page – Add custom content to the public search results screen! Admins: head to Admin Stuff > Ask Us Form > Search Form.

New in Reference Analytics:

• READ Scale Integration – Many of you asked for an easy way to integrate the Reference Effort Assessment Data (READ) Scale when recording Reference Analytics transactions – so we added an easy solution! Admins will see a new option when editing an instance – “Use the READ Scale?”. This integrates the qualitative six-point scale and guidelines for use directly in your record a transaction screen.
• Design changes for the Record a Transaction screen – We’re always working to make sure our tools have the best design possible, so the Record Transaction screen got a facelift! We’ve nipped, tucked, and cleaned things up, shedding unnecessary popups and onscreen text to deliver a cleaner, user friendlier look.
• Customizable widths on the Record a Transaction screen – want to customize the widths of the selection boxes on the Record a Transaction screen? Now you can! Check out this faq for instructions.

If you answered yes to any of the above – then SpringyCamp wants you!

SpringyCamp, April 13th 2012 focuses on Integration. We need presenters who have:

• Integrated Springshare products in cool & innovative ways!
  • LibCal My Scheduler in LibAnswers?
  • LibAnalytics Widgets in LibGuides?
  • LibAnswers widgets in LibGuides?
  • … other integrations we haven’t thought of but YOU have!
• Integrated your Springshare content in outside systems (Facebook, CMS, LMS & More!).
• Integrated:
  • Realities? Blended physical & mobile worlds via QR Codes, SMS Keywords, Mobile Site Builder?
  • Across departments? Within or, outside, your Library.
  • … and more!

 So what are you waiting for? Submit your proposal NOW!

• Enhanced Content in Books from the Catalog box*
  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enter an ISBN and automatically retrieve information for any book? Now you can! Just enter an ISBN, and we’ll automatically pull in the item’s title, author, and cover art.
  CampusGuides Mega Bonus: Our CampusGuides clients can also pull book descriptions, bestseller lists, Subject Categories, Publisher information, and other enhanced content from Bowker – for free, to be used in your guides! 
• Translate Public Screens
  LibGuides en Espanol? Francais? Italiano? Libraries can now customize the hard-coded text on public screens in their local language. If your local language is English, you can also customize the text to meet your needs. For example, change the search box drop-down to read “This Site” instead of “All Guides”. To customize your language file, email support@springshare.com to get started!
• New “Edit Box” menu
  You’ll love the consolidated menu in the “edit box” area. We combined all box edit functions into one screen. Just click “edit box”, and you’ll be able to change the box title, type, colors, etc. Even better, you can grab each box’s direct link, as well as an API call for any box, all in the same screen!
• Add Longer Descriptions to the Links & Lists box
  We get it. 500 characters for description in the Links & Lists box wasn’t enough, so we’ve upped the length of the description field to 1,000 characters.
• Using the Serials Solutions A-Z Import Tool?
  Now you can update the 3-letter Serials Solutions ID for any previously imported link! Just head to your A-Z import guide and select “edit link”. You’ll see a new tab for “Serials Solutions” – click it to change the Serials Solutions Database Identifier.
• CampusGuides clients can now upload files up to 10MB in size
  CampusGuides folks – we’ve doubled your file upload size from 5MB to 10MB.
• Update to AddThis Button
  The email function in the AddThis button on public screens is back up and working properly!
• Guide Status Notification on all screens
  Seriously – sometimes it’s all about the little things. We’ve added a note to the edit guide screen that lets you know the guide’s current status – Unpublished, Published, or Private.

* Please remember – free use of Syndetics cover art and Bowker content is limited to use within LibGuides and CampusGuides

• Winning Lottery Numbers
• Ice Cream Scoops
• Vacation Days
• Donuts
• Roses
• When your hometown wins the Superbowl, Stanley Cup, World Series and NBA Finals all in the same year (Not this year Boston!)
• …. and Springshare’s Multiple Mobile Sites Builder!

If you’ve been looking for a way to create multiple mobile sites for your institution, here’s your opportunity: subscribe to Springshare’s multiple Mobile Site Builder sites! Now other departments within, or outside, of your library can create a mobile presence as easy as 1, 2, 3.

What else is new? We’ve integrated all mobile aspects of LibGuides and CampusGuides, so all of your mobile functionality can be found in one place: Admin Stuff > Mobile Settings:

Our Admin Stuff menu has changed a bit - Mobile Settings are now located under the "Customize" heading.

Once there, you’ll be able to modify your mobile settings for your LibGuides/CampusGuides site as well as create/modify your hierarchies for your Mobile Site Builder sites.

Calendars/Event Management

• The Wait List feature is here! If more people want to register for an event than you have space for, enable a waiting list
• Calendar APIs and RSS feeds continue to expand – we’ve added support for pulling events from multiple calendars in the Event APIs, and better diacritic support for RSS feeds
• Email templates are fully customizable - customize the automated emails when patrons register/are waitlisted for/cancel events!

My Scheduler

• We’ve added a location field – when people book appointments, they’ll know where to go!
• Do you have LibGuides? When you customize your profile, click the checkbox to add the Schedule an Appointment widget!
• Embed the widget multiple times on the same page – show the availability of everyone on your team in one public interface!
• Email templates are fully customizable – send automated confirmation and cancellation emails when patrons book appointments, and customize their text!

Room Booking

• Room Booking Explorer – view booking history, filter on tons of options, search on patron information (name, email, group nickname, etc.) and export information to Excel!
• We’ve added patron “nicknames” for their own bookings – this nickname shows up in the public Room schedule, so individuals can see where their group is meeting
• New Photo field -  show patrons which room they’re signing up for.
• Better yet, that room photo, as well as the entire room booking process, is included in the Mobile Optimized Room Booking view!

Plus, we’ve tweaked the Room Booking permission settings, based on your feedback:

• More Booking Duration values – whether you’re working with 30 minute time-slots or 54 minute periods, LibCal’s got you covered!
• Patrons can sign up for a room “Before Slot’s Ending Time” (ie halfway through a slot)
• We added an option to restrict “Booking in Advance”, so admins can choose how long into the future a patron can book a room. 1 week? 1 Month? 3 Months? OK!

Whew – that’s a lot of features! We hope you’re enjoying LibCal – from early user feedback, we’re hearing it’s the easiest, most intuitive calendar/event management/personal scheduler/room booking tool available. If you haven’t tried it yet, sign up for your 3-for-free today! http://springshare.com/libcal

• The new Dashboard screen (you’ll see it when you first log in) is clean and (we hope!) easy to navigate. You can always get back to the Dashboard from any screen, thanks to the link in the top-left corner of the menu bar.
• Admins – the Admin Alert Boxes are here! You can create system messages, reminders, links to your help and style guidelines, etc. and display them right on the screen where your content creators are! You have 2 alert boxes available – one on the Dashboard, and another on the Create Guide screen.
• RSS Feeds – The Tools menu has all the tools you know and love (API, Widgets, Link Checker & Bookmarklet), plus the new RSS Feeds tool! Instead of hunting around through guides, user profiles, etc. to find the RSS Feeds for your site, we figured we’d make things easy on you and put all the feeds in one spot.
• Add-on Module – The Modules menu has a new link for Add-on Module users – this offers a quick way to upload images and manage your image library, and gives you a quick way to access your site’s XML export and individual Guide Backups (HTML)

As you’ll quickly notice, the biggest change in this update is organization. The administrative organization of the system hasn’t changed since LibGuides was introduced in 2007. In that time, we’ve added hundreds of features and tools, and the administrative interface was reaching a critical mass. We really hope you’ll find the new interface intuitive, and we’re excited to hear what you think!

-Slaven and the Springy Team

As an aside, we know that many folks are experiencing issues with Syndetics images displaying in guides. This issue is not related to yesterday’s update – thanks to an unseasonable Nor’easter that hit the East Coast over the weekend, Syndetics servers appear to be down. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we know our friends at Syndetics are working hard to get things back online as soon as they can!

A big round of applause and congrats goes out to all librarians creating and maintaining guides to publish and share information. Librarians are the best information/knowledge professionals out there and, in our opinion, many of these guides represent the highest quality information found on the internet. We love seeing this growth – more guides means more content is being shared, more ideas are being exchanged, and better quality information is getting out there.

Keep up the great work – onwards and upwards to the next milestone! Dare we say 1,000,000 Guides? With more libraries joining our community every day, we’ll get there sooner than you think!