New guide

Congratulatipons to Andrew who has just published a new guide for Tropical Plants Sciences and Agriculture.

New guide published

Congratulations to Margaret - the Psychology guide is now published - check it out!

More guides published

Congratulations to Andrew who has just published 2 new guides:
Marine Biology & Aquaculture
Zoology & Tropical Ecology
It's good to see our collection is growing!

RSS feeds

There was some discussion about whether it would be possible to set up an RSS feed to the A-Z Template guide to keep track of any changes or additions that may require action for other guides. Unfortunately Springshare have confirmed that it is only possible to set up an RSS feed to a guide that has the status of Published, and we do not want to publish the A-Z Template because then it would appear in our LibGuides Home page. Until we come up with a better solution I will post messages to this blog about any major changes or additions to the template, and small updates will continue to appear in all your linked content boxes.

LibGuides Committee meeting notes

Thanks to Bronwen, the latest LibGuides Committee meeting notes are on JustUs.

How to do (almost) nothing and promote your Libguide(s) at the same time!!

You’re looking for an easy way to promote your Libguide to people that you’ve contact with? By investing 1 minute 43 seconds of your precious time right now, you’ll do it on a regular basis, without even noticing it!
Just add a line to your email signature with a link to it! Make sure to save it as an htm format (that way, Thunderbird will be able to manage the hyperlink), change the paragraph marks (^p) for a line marks (^l) to make it nicer, and VOILÀ!!
So, every time you’ll send an email, the recipient(s) will have a direct access to your fantastic LibGuide!!
And now, just wait to see the new increasing stats about the visitors to your LibGuides!

Example:
A new tool for the Business community at JCU - The Marketing Libguide!!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Charles Cardinal
Liaison Librarian (Business)
James Cook University - Cairns Campus

P.S. That’s just a tip, many other actions should be taken to promote of your LibGuides!

Computing guides

As agreed at the last LibGuides Committee meeting, I have created a new "How do I...?" for the Computing guides content box that is currently in the About the Library page because it takes up too much valuabe space.
I have not yet deleted the old Computing guides content box because many of you will have linked to it, so please delete that box in your guide and add the new page under your "How do I ...?" tab. I'll delete the old content box in 2 weeks.

Faculty blogs

Two updates:
1. The Template LibGuide name has been changed to A-Z Template so you don't have to scroll down so far to link your content boxes
2. I have added RSS feed content boxes for each of the faculty blogs on the Home page

Evaluating sources published

Congratulations to Mark for publishing the Evaluating sources guide.
This is terrific for everyone because we can now link our How do I evaluate sources? tab to this guide - here's how:

1. Click on Add/Edit pages
2. Select Change Page Info
3. Select Evaluate what I find
4. Add the URL http://libguides.jcu.edu.au/evaluating
5. Click on Save changes

When users click on this tab now they will be taken to Mark's guide. You can also link to individual content boxes from the guide - see the instructions for Linking to another content box.

Marketing guide published

Congratulations to Charles who has just published his Marketing guide. Please have a look at the guide which is now linked from our Subject Resources page. Charles is going to embark on a marketing campaign with his Marketing lecturers and it will be interesting to see what responses he gets.

JCU's research via Scopus Affiliated

There is a new content box in the template that lists JCU's latest research via a Scopus RSS feed - see JCU's latest research
You can create your own feed for subject areas, authors, years, or document types or link to this one that covers all of JCU via the Affiliation Search option.

Embedding research skills

I have added a new guide called Embedding research skills to the Information Literacy content box under About the Library. It includes a lot of discipline specific examples of IL skills being embedded into subjects. There are some good ideas in there that you may be able to utilise with your teaching staff. Please send me any additions that you come across.
If you have linked to this box you should see the addition in your own guides.

Databases and logos

I have added nearly all of the databases that are listed in the old subject guides to a table in the (Abracadabra) Template guide as per the last LibGuides Committee meeting decision - see Databases. If I've missed any databases you need please let me know.
You should copy this content box into your guide then delete the rows that you don't need.
Feel free to amend the descriptions for your disciplines.

First subject guide published

I am delighted to announce that our first subject guide has been published in LibGuides. Please check Bronwen's History guide which is now linked from our Subject Resources page. Bronwen has consulted extensively and tested the guide with students with very positive responses so she should be congratulated for being an early adopter of this great new application.

Opinion survey - New name for Template guide

The development of new libguides is now a daily reality. It's facilitated by
Katrina's Template Guide page where we could link a myriad of boxes from this page.
As you will see when you want to create a new box by linking it from this Guide, you just have to scroll down the menu and select "Template Guide by Katrina Keith". You will soon realise that you need to link a lot of boxes from this guide to yours, and you have to scroll down a lot of Libguides created by JCU Librarians to reach it.

After discussing with the creator/owner of this Guide, Katrina, about the fact that this page is too far below in the scroll-down menu, I suggested to change its name that will bring it the first one on the list. You'll find below suggestions (sorted alphabetically) for a new name for this useful and resourceful Guide. The eventual new name will just be apply to the Template Guide, not to all the libguides;-) Please vote for your prefered one (or suggest a new one):

1 and the only 1 Template guide
1001 boxes Template guide
A to Z Template guide
AAA-Template
ABC Template guide
Abracadabra Template guide
Absolutely amazing, marvellous and fantastic Template guide
Ali Baba Template cave

Poll will close on the 3rd of November, 2009 (as soon as the Melbourne Cup is over!!).

Charles

Information foraging: Do our links explicitly describe content?

I've been thinking about how we use the Description and More information fields in our Lists & Links content boxes and this quote from one of Alan's favourite people, Jakob Nielsen, confirmed my preference for having some brief descriptive text for each link:

"The most obvious design lesson from information scent is to ensure that links and category descriptions explicitly describe what users will find at the destination. Faced with several navigation options, it's best if users can clearly identify the trail to the prey and see that other trails are devoid of anything edible."

It's particularly important when the link text is not informative, or in some cases is misleading, eg, ScienceDirect would appear to only be useful for the discipline of science, so please use these fields to guide your students to key content.

"First, convince users that the site is worthy of their attention. As I described above, this means having good information and making it easy to find.
Second, once they arrive, make it easy for users to find even more good stuff so that they stay rather than go elsewhere. An entire movement was devoted to the idea of sticky sites and extended visits."

If you're interested in the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online then you'll find the complete article by Jakob Nielsen at Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster
- Information Scent: Predicting a Path's Success
- Diet Selection: What to Eat
- Patch Leaving: When to Hunt Elsewhere
- Informavore Navigation Behavior
- Learn More

Tag clouds

If you want to create a tag cloud in your LibGuide see Tag Cloud Generator
You'll also find instructions and some examples oin the Authors guide - Create a tag cloud
Have fun!

Embedding Wolfram Alpha Search Widget Inside your LibGuides

This is great news from Slaven at the Springshare Support Blog. Note that your widget (and other javascript applications) may not show up immediately. You might need to refresh a couple of times and/or go away, have a coffee, and come back later to admire your handiwork. I have added one to Wolfram|Alpha
*******************************
You have probably heard about Wolfram Alpha by now. It is a new search engine/technology – a “computational knowledge engine that draws on multiple sources to answer user queries directly.” (quote from their website). Some people think it’s the next big thing in search, others disagree, but one thing is true – it’s a neat technology. Recently, the folks behind it released the Wolfram Alpha widgets which can be embedded into any website to allow visitors to query the Wolfram Alpha search engine from anywhere. http://www.wolframalpha.com/addtoyoursite.html

We have prepared step-by-step instructions for embedding the Wolfram Alpha search widget into your LibGuides. You can find the instructions at the following url:

http://help.libguides.com/content.php?pid=76937&sid=569946 .

Enjoy!

NAPCAN: Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect

Ejournal lists by subject

Are you interested in creating lists of ejournals in your LibGuides? eg

1. Do a subject search in our Ejournal portal
2. View the HTML source code
3. Copy & paste the relevant bit of code into your Rich Text content box (HTML) and voila, you have a list of links to your subject!


If anyone wants more detailed instructions with screen shots please let me know and I'll add this to the guide for Authors

Embedding videos

If you're looking for videos to embed in your guides you might like to check out YouTube EDU or Slideshare
Remember that most videos need to be placed in the centre column because they are too wide for the left and right columns.

APA manual - 6th edition

For those of you who have linked to the Referencing page in the Template you will see that the 6th edition of the APA manual has been added to the Books @ JCU content box.
If you see any other generic content boxes that need updating please don't forget to let me know.

Location of "How to use this guide"

The content box "How to use this guide" on the Home page has an image of drop-down tab items that is 364 pixels wide. This means that it should only be used in the centre column which is usually 520 pixels wide (if you have 3 columns). If you use this content box in the left or right columns it will display OK in most browsers, but may cause problems in IE6 - we had one case where it displayed OK in the left column (though it was a bit hard to read because it was so small) but it pushed a content box from the right column into the centre column.

Writing for the web and other articles

I found these articles on the web which may be useful. They are written by a web / internet professional with strong experience in web marketing. The articles encourage looking at a website from a marketing point of view: encouraging visitors to stay and explore the site and try what is offered.

Web copy: getting it right
Interaction generation

The below articles are more related to commercial sites, however, they do give useful information on how to regularly communicate with our audience and encourage return visitors

Successful online retail
E-commerce: selling online while we are not trying to make a profit, we are trying to sell our databases and other resources as a better alternative to Google.

Alert services explain to users

Just sneaking on other libguides, and I found that adding a box (or tab) on Alert Services could be very useful and relevant for most of our libguides (well, not really for the libguides but for the users of those libguides). Three different alert services could be explain: Table of contents (eTOC), databases search and citation alerts. How about creating a generic one, and after that, we could adapt it to our respective subjects? The big question.... where users will find it? Under How to..., under Research, or Journal articles? My preference will be under Research, and as a tab. But this is just my opinion.

Some good examples:

http://guides.lib.msu.edu/page.phtml?page_id=669

http://libguides.usu.edu/content.php?pid=1590

Regards

Meebo

I have added content boxes to the Generic and Template guides for those of you who are using Meebo. You can copy or link to these boxes from your own guides.

Logos & other images

Quality images are powerful attention grabbers in LibGuides so I have contacted most of our major publishers seeking permission to use company logos in our guides. Most have agreed and I have placed their logos in the Generic content guide on a separate page called Images.

If there are other companies you'd like me to contact please just ask, or if you already have permission from a company I haven't included please let me know and I'll add it to the list. I'll keep the permissions all together for future reference.

Many companies have great packages of materials for promoting their products, including templates for emails and posters, training materials, banners, logos, videos. many companies are also happy to send you packages of materials for training sessions or showcases. We should use these free resources to maximise our investment in these expensive products (and save ourselves time!).

• BioMed Central has a Resource Center for Librarians that includes flyers, posters, online advertisements, web & catalogue text as well as logos.
• CABI also has promotional materials For Librarians
• Ovid has a Librarian Toolkit
• Credo has Promoting Credo Reference
• ProQuest has a Publisher Toolkit
• Sage has Usage Driving Materials
• Scopus has Promotional Tools
• Wiley has a Library Toolkit
• NetLibrary has a Marketing Kit
• Springer has Springer at YourLibrary 

Deep linking to Tropicat

In the training sessions we looked at how you would use the Books from the Catalog content box. The instructions for deep linking to items in Tropicat have been amended - there is no need to change the profile. Please check the revised instructions at Deep linking to the catalogue and always double-check that your links work.

Shared guides

We've had some discussions about how to handle shared authorship of guides and how the profile box should be constructed.  If there are multiple authors the software will add individual author profiles vertically in the right column and there is no option to reorder these boxes on the page. Because LibGuides allows up to 4 people to share a guide (original creator plus 3 editors) it could create a very long page!

To get around this problem I have set up a 3 examples on the Home page in the Template and Generic guides using a regular content box. As Alan suggested in his latest Technology Roundup No 6, we should minimise duplication of contact details so these examples simply link the user back to the profile pages on the CMS via the photos, the names and Website/profile/contact. If we go for this option you will need to hide the profile page/s on every page (sorry, but there is no option to switch them off for a whole guide).

Please let me know what you think of these examples, or if you have any other ideas about how we could handle the problem.

Notes on shared guides

The person who sets up the guide is the one who:

• Receives user comments or feedback
• Can check usage statistics
• Can check for broken links (and should fix them!)
• Will be listed as the "owner" librarian on the JCU LibGuides Home page

LibGuides instructions for authors

You can find a LibGuide version of the training documentation at http://libguides.jcu.edu.au/authors
This version will be more current than the paper version so please use this as your reference. Let me now if there is anything you want to know how to do that is not included in this guide.

Template

The Template LibGuide has been modified and you can find it at http://libguides.jcu.edu.au/template
It has the core set of tabs that you should use in all your guides, though it may be necessary to make adjustments for some disciplines. We'd prefer it if all the guides look pretty standard so that we don't confuse the poor students who may be studying across disciplines.

Note: the tab "All subject guides" will disappear when we have moved all our guides to the LibGuides platform.

Welcome

Welcome to the JCU LibGuides blog!

Please use this blog to share comments, questions, problems and solutions that you find when you're creating your LibGuides.