Introducing the LibAnswers FAQ!
We’re happy to announce a new way for you to get help with your LibAnswers questions – the LibAnswers FAQ! On this new site, you’ll be able to look for commonly asked questions and submit new questions that will be answered promptly by our Community & Training team.
Not sure what to expect from the FAQ? Here are a few questions that are in our system already…
Q: How do the SMS auto-responders work? What happens if someone texts us when our library is closed? (Answer)
Q: How do I add a LibAnswers search box to our home page? (Answer)
Q: What alert options are available to tell me when there’s a new question? (Answer)
We also want to let you know that we’ve given the LibGuides FAQ a face lift – it’s not just for LibGuides anymore! You can also find answers and submit questions about CampusGuides & CommunityGuides. To reflect our new purpose, we’ve renamed the site – it is now the Guide FAQ.
Want to see new questions and answers? Follow us on Twitter! You can also submit questions by tweeting @libanswersfaq or @guidefaq.
LibGuides & Learning Management Systems: Share Your Story!
There’s a conversation on the Springshare Lounge about integrating information from guides into learning management systems (LMS) such as Blackboard, Moodle, &Desire2Learn. We know there are a lot of experts on this topic in the LibGuides community, so we’re reaching out to you! How are you integrating your LibGuides content into your LMS? Share your story in the Lounge, or in the comments below!
Here’s a few questions to help get the ball rolling:
- What LMS does your school use?
- How does your library gain access to your school’s LMS? (partnerships with faculty, direct access through IT, etc.)
- What kind of content do you integrate into the LMS – Contact Information? Lists of databases? Etc.
- What LibGuides tools – the API Utility, widgets, etc. – do you use to help streamline this process?
- Tell us something you wish everyone knew about integrating content into an LMS
- If other people have questions, can they contact you?
Tab Enhancement
A quick update – we’re rolling out a small enhancement to the public display of guides. If your guide only contains one page, the “Home” tab will no longer display in the public view. You’ll still see it when editing in admin mode, but your patrons will see a cleaner page view. A big thanks to everyone who requested this enhancement!
Monthly LibGuides Stats – December 2010
A relaxing December put a cap on a very exciting 2010, where our LibGuides community grew by 800 member libraries and over 11,000 librarians! Thank you very much to all the LibGuides, CampusGuides, CommunityGuides, and LibAnswers users out there – it has been a pleasure working with all of you in 2010, and we look forward to another great year of collaboration and innovation!
| Community Sites: | 1802 |
| Librarian Accounts: | 27,069 |
| Total Guides: | 132,019 |
| Total Pages: | 856,025 |
| Unique Visitors: | 1.39 million |
| Page Views: | 31.51 million |
A-Z Import Now Pulls in Custom Database Names
This past weekend our friends at Serials Solutions announced that custom database names are available via their API, so we are now able to import those custom values into LibGuides!
The way it works is as follows – if your resource has been assigned a custom name in the Serials Solutions interface, we will import the resource into LibGuides using that custom name. For any resources that do not have a custom name assigned, we will use the default resource name provided by Serials Solutions as we have done in the past.
If you have already imported your resource list and would like to update your existing links to use the custom names, just run the A-Z import tool from within LibGuides and be sure to check the box for all links you wish to update. Any links that were previously imported using the default name will be updated to use your local, custom name – it couldn’t be easier! 
If you’d like to learn more about this tool, check out our guide: A-Z Resource List Management
LibAnswers helps libraries win the race!
Here’s a “too good not to share” story from our friends at Albuquerque/Bernalillo County (ABC) Libraries, who published a LibAnswer that received 11,000+ views in 5 days.
An online trivia contest (“Outwit the West” – top prize: $1 million dollars) recently caused an internet sensation, and a patron submitted one of the questions from the contest to ABC Librarians via LibAnswers’ SMS service. The question was:
What horse won the 800 yard Christmas Day race between Perico and Dude in Fairview NM in 1886?
Before they could respond to the original SMS, ABC Librarians started seeing the question crop up in multiple channels – through LibAnswers, phone calls, and emails. And the answer was ambiguous: The race was scheduled in Fairview, NM on Christmas Day, 1866 – but was won, by Perico, on January 10th, in Chloride, NM – and the library’s considerable archives offered no information on what happened in between.
What happened next is a great example of jumping head first into social media. Using LibAnswers, ABC Librarian Anne Lefkofsky was able to quickly publish the info the library had on the race. The answer’s URL was shared in contest discussion forums, and it spread like wildfire. As trivia hunters asked for more details, library staffers updated the answer with more source materials. When patrons called the library, staff emailed them the answer with two clicks. Meanwhile, LibAnswers’ built-in Search Engine Optimization meant the answer quickly rose to the top of internet search rankings.
The real-time statistics in LibAnswers let the ABC Librarians know how popular the question had become. Within a few hours of posting, the answer had 500 hits; by the next day, 5,000. Driven by the popularity of this topic, ABC Librarians created a new LibGuide that compiled links to climate data, maps of the towns involved, images, and user link submission. Not long afterward, a librarian from the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library in Santa Fe, NM submitted a link to a photo of the elusive newspaper that explained exactly what happened on Christmas Day, 1886 in Fairview, NM. Pretty amazing, right!?
The end result? Eleven thousand people found the ABC Libraries LibAnswer, which now linked them to a resource only available at another library. Talk about librarians using technology to improve services and collaboration! When we contacted David Hurley (Digital Services Manager at the ABC Library System) about the story, he put things in context: If those 11,000 hits saved the time spent answering a hundred phone calls or emails to our Special Collections library, then LibAnswers paid for itself with one question. And us? We’re really pleased that LibAnswers and LibGuides got to play a small part in a success story like this. Way to go, Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Librarians – you rock!
New and Improved Form and Survey Tool
In our recent code update, the Form & Survey tool got a massive face lift. If you’re not yet familiar with the Form & Survey tool, it’s all kinds of awesome. It’s a standard part of any CampusGuides/CommunityGuides system, and offers a centralized way to manage, deploy, collect and analyze just about any type of form-based information. Creating forms and surveys only takes a few minutes, and we make them super easy to deploy by providing persistent URLs, and simple embed code. Results are collected in real-time, and can be exported directly into excel.
How can you use this tool? We’re glad you asked! 
Here are a few examples:
- Use it like a survey tool to collect:
- Formal feedback about library programs and services
- Targeted feedback about your guides (or any web-presence you maintain)
- Feedback on special events and programming
- Use it like a form builder to collect:
- New materials suggestions
- Appointment request forms
- Interlibrary Loan request forms
- Requests for live instruction sessions
In our recent update, we added many new features to this tool. We expanded the types of questions you can ask, which now include radio buttons, checkboxes, and drop-down selections, as well as single- and multi-line free-text fields. We did a massive update to the overall interface (mad props to JC!) – now, you can view a form’s properties/css style and a preview of the finished version side-by-side, so you can see your changes update as you edit! Form styles are fully customizable, so you control every aspect of the look and feel. We expanded the preference options, so you can control your form’s visibility dates, assign multiple email addresses to receive submission notices, and create optional password protection. We added an easy “copy” feature, so if you’re adding a new form or survey, you don’t have to start from scratch!
We’re very excited about these new updates. If you’re a current CampusGuides/CommunityGuides customer, you can check out the changes right now! If you’re not, what are you waiting for? Email sales@springshare.com and request your free demo account!
Monthly LibGuides Stats – November 2010
| Community Sites: | 1764 |
| Librarian Accounts: | 26,386 |
| Total Guides: | 128,272 |
| Total Pages: | 829,040 |
| Unique Visitors: | 2.08 million |
| Page Views: | 51.75 million |
LibAnswers Code Update – Mobile, Multi-lingual, Faster… Oh my!
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:
- 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! - 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.
- 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.
Monthly LibGuides Stats – October 2010
This month we are happy to report that the LibGuides / CampusGuides community has surpassed two million unique visitors in a month for the first time! Combine that with our highest ever monthly page-view total, and its easy to see our community is growing faster than ever!
| Community Sites: | 1710 |
| Librarian Accounts: | 25,521 |
| Total Guides: | 122,421 |
| Total Pages: | 790,532 |
| Unique Visitors: | 2.10 million |
| Page Views: | 57 million |
