Springshare Support Blog

Things that are good on their own but better in multiples:

• 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.

For those of you who haven’t experienced the wonder of LibCal yet, we’re offering a great deal – our 3-for-free deal gets you 3 Calendars, 3 Schedulers, & 3 Room Bookings for free!  In the 2 months since LibCal was released, we’ve already installed over 250 systems, and added more than 20 new features based on user requests. Here are a few highlights:

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! springshare.com/libcal

The new LibGuides & CampusGuides SEI update is live! Thanks go out to everyone who offered feedback that led to this major redesign of the back end interface. For a full walkthrough of the organization changes, check out: help.springshare.com/lgcg-sei. Here are some of our favorite highlights:

• 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!

We’ve often been amazed by the astounding growth rate for guides in LibGuides & CampusGuides – clearly, librarians have a lot of wisdom to share! And today’s milestone has surprised us yet again – as of today, there are over 200,000 librarian-created guides in the system, and more than 1.3 million pages of content in those guides. What’s more amazing is, it took almost 3 years to hit the first 100,000 guides, but only 1 year to double that amount – wow!!

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!

As you may already know from the last couple of newsletters (June and September), we’re getting ready to release a new version of the system, with significantly updated dashboard and management screens. The current dashboard hasn’t changed since the system’s inception in 2007, and we’ve added hundreds of new features, so… things were getting a little cramped back there, if you know what we mean.

This update will affect all content creators in LibGuides & CampusGuides – System Administrators, Librarians, and anyone with an account in the system. We put together a guide - help.springshare.com/lgcg-sei - to help you with the transition. It has detailed information about the new stuff and a screenshot tour of the new interface. Please read it carefully to get acquainted with the new look and organization.

The actual code update will occur over the weekend of October 29-30. There will be no system downtime during this code update.

As always, we’re excited to hear what you think – if you have any questions, ideas, or kudos, don’t be shy – let us know!

help.springshare.com/lgcg-sei 

You probably know this about us by now, but when we hear great ideas from clients, we like to make them happen fast. Created thanks to a mix of great ideas and Ninja know-how, our new Duration Analysis report is a great way to view how much time you’re spending on transactions (instruction sessions, research consultations, etc.). Here’s how it works:

When you record a transaction, make sure you’re recording start and end time using the Time Stamp field:

Head to the Data Explorer, and generate a report based on any combination of fields and values. You’ll see a new report - Duration Analysis. Use this tab to discover:

1. Total time spent on all transactions (how much time was spent delivering instruction/reference sessions?)
2. Maximum & Minimum transaction durations (what’s the longest and shortest session time?)
3. Average & Median transaction durations (what’s the average duration of your sessions?)
4. Quick Links to the Longest and Shortest transactions (what’s this session that took 300 minutes?)

Plus, we’ve added a new report filter! The Optional Duration Filter filters reports based on transaction duration – use it to discover things like:

1. Which transactions took < 30 minutes?
2. Which transactions took > 60 minutes?
3. Which transactions lasted exactly 45 minutes?

We are announcing two important new features for LibAnalytics: Instance Designer and LibAnalytics Widgets. These new features open up a slew of possibilities to use LibAnalytics in a whole new way.

Our new Instance Designer makes it easy to fully customize the look and feel of your instance! It has everything from reordering fields using a drag-and-drop interface, to being able to define instructions and help text for each field. The new interface makes it easy to customize what your instance recording screen will look like.

And, we’re adding a new tool to your Data Ninja arsenal – LibAnalytics Widgets. Hold on to your hats, because we’re about to turn the concept of LibAnalytics “instances” on its ear!

When we talk about ”instances”, all we mean is “a set of data that libraries want to track”. Up until now, the librarians were the only ones who could record this data in LibAnalytics. But we got to thinking – what if we open data-recording to users? What about collecting patron feedback? Satisfaction surveys, feedback on library instruction, website feedback, database trials… why should librarians always be the ones entering data? Open the data recording and collection to everyone, and then use our awesome analytics tools to make sense of all your data.

Thus, LibAnalytics Widgets were born! Forged in the dark fires of our ninja enclave, LibAnalytics widgets give you the power to collect user feedback right from the source. For example, let’s say you want to collect feedback about your library website. Create an instance for “Website Feedback”, and embed a widget on your library website. You can have the feedback widget appear on page load, on page exit, on button click, etc. Examples:

Floating Button Widget (note the feedback button on the left side of the screen)

Embedded Text Widget (note the purple area below the banner)

Or send an email to faculty with a link to your survey, like this: demo.libanalytics.com/p.php?in=238

LibAnalytics now enables you to collect all kinds of data, from all kinds of sources, all in one place. You can browse the data, find patterns, generate statistics, and analyze stuff like there’s no tomorrow.

If you thought it doesn’t get any better, well it does – a single instance of LibAnalytics is free, so sign up today and get started on your Data Ninja skills.

We’re so excited, and we just can’t hide it! What’s got us so hyped up, you ask? We’re announcing *Free* subscriptions for our two newest products: LibCal and LibAnalytics. Pretty awesome right? We thought so too!

A free subscription to LibCal comes with all the bells and whistles – event registration management, personal schedulers, and room booking management. You get 3 calendars, 3 personal schedulers, and 3 room bookings – all free!

And our free LibAnalytics instance is also the whole enchilada – collect data points, record unlimited transactions, and view/download awesome reports.

We say this all the time, but we want you to know – we love being a part of the library community. We love working with clients and creating web apps that solve real problems for libraries. Giving something back for free, especially in these difficult budget times, is a way for us to say “thank you” for your continued support, and the trust you’ve placed in us.

With that in mind, we hope you’ll check out LibCal and LibAnalytics and sign up today!

The last LibAnswers update was just 4 weeks ago, but our LibAnswers development team has been feeling hyper this August, so we’ve just rolled out some excellent new features!

• Full-text Search has arrived – WOO HOO! You can now search the full text of question and answer contents, both in