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.