Campus Guides

The company that provides our Libguides software is called Springshare. At JCU we recently upgraded our software to the Campus Guides product. For your typical user and editor there is no change in the user experience or skills required to do your usual updating.

Campus Guides does open up a lot of new features to make our guides more customisable and allow more interactive usage, such as designing our own forms and surveys. We will be organising a Webinar by Springhare for people to find out more about Campus Guides. They do offer regular Webinars from their website but they are in the evening in our time zone so we will organise one at a more convenient time. 

In the interim there is plenty of information on their site to introduce the features of Campus Guides. Here are some ideas to get you thinking about possible uses for the forms and surveys feature. Contact a member of the Libguides committee if you would like to put forward your ideas for this feature. 

Springshare code updates

Springshare have just announced a number of code updates that some of you may have noticed already. Here is the list as reported in the Springshare blog. If you have questions about any of them please discuss via this blog.

"These updates represent several months of work from our talented tech team, along with dozens of suggestions from our LG / LA / CG user communities! As you will see, there is a lot to review, so lets get started!

LibGuides

* The LibGuides text editor now allows you to toggle between rich and plain text modes without first needing to save you work. We also added a “Save Changes” button so you can save your text without closing the editor, as well as a status area that lets you know when you have pending changes that need to be saved.
* You can now change the order of sub-pages manually, so there is no longer a need to add numeric prefixes to the sub-page names in order to control the page order. When reusing a page, you can also choose to make it a top-level page or a sub-page right from the Reuse Page screen.
* When creating a new link, book, or event you can now decide if that item will open in a new window or the same window on an item-by-item basis. Any item that does not have its own custom “target” will use the default specified on the System Settings page.
* We have added a new “User Profile” content box type that will allow you to embed a LibGuides user profile box in any column, at any position, within your guide.
* Enhanced User Profile pages give you the ability to add your office hours, as well as additional custom content by creating one rich text box and one links box. You may also disable your LibGuides profile page if you would prefer to not have it be visible to the public.
* We have also added a dedicated Facebook URL field to the profiles, so that you can easily link to your Facebook profile or library’s page within your profile.
* The new Collaborator feature allows you to co-create a guide with a person who does not have their own LibGuides account. A guide Collaborator has rights to create and edit content on just a single guide in the system, allowing them to assist you with the content creation without having access to other guides or the admin areas of the system.
* When reusing links, you are now able to customize the “description” and “more information” fields, so you can tailor the link information to each specific guide.
* With the new “Links to Guides” content box type you can create a box that allows you to browse by subject/librarian, view all published guides in the system, browse by most popular guides, most recent guides, etc.
* LibGuides pages now have a visibility setting, allowing you to remove entire pages from the public view with a single click.
* All cover art from Syndetics is now retrieved at the highest possible resolution, and scaled down accordingly, to ensure the highest quality for all cover art images.
* We updated our code so that Google Analytics will pick up link hits in Links & Lists and Simple Web Links boxes! All you need to do is add the Google Analytics tracking code in the Custom < HEAD > Code box on the System-wide Settings page. Your link hits will then show up in the “Content” report in the GA console.
* You can now search for content within a Private Guide, assuming you are already on that guide and use the “This Guide” option in the search drop-down menu. We also added a “view homepage” link to each of the results on the search results screen, so you can easily jump to any guide homepage right from the search results."

New feature: Book cover images

Just before Xmas Springshare did a deal with Syndetics to provide LibGuides subscribers with free access to book cover images.

When you add a Books from the Catalog content box you now get the option to add cover images from Amazon or Syndetics (click on the blue S).

Syndetics images are available in 3 different image sizes - 94px, 187px and 400px - so you have the option to use a larger image if you want to highlight a "Book of the week/month".

Unlike Amazon, Syndetics can use 13 digit ISBNs which is also great.

The beauty of the Syndetics images is that they use the URL that you have entered to take the user straight to our Tropicat entry if they click on the cover image.

The downside is that the quality of some of the small images in Syndetics is poor - I have raised this as an issue with Springshare and will let you know if they have a solution.

If you select an Amazon or a Syndetics image and it doesn't exist in their database you will get a blank space in your guide where the image would normally appear. If you have used Syndetics and the user clicks on that blank space they still go to the Tropicat entry. If you use Amazon they will be taken to the Amazon website.