For many of you, you’ve been using LibCal Seats in your libraries for months now. It helped you reopen your buildings, with occupancy restrictions to control how many people were inside at any given time, and it helped you with track & trace protocols with detailed check-in/out functionality.
But what you might not know, is that LibCal Seats is being used beyond the library. Many campus IT departments saw what the library was doing, and said, hey that could work for us! So kudos to your innovation which helps inspire others! FIT uses LibCal Seats to safely reopen their campus labs and studios with a system called Book It. The University of Michigan uses LibCal Seats across their campuses, including for their dining hall – so students can even reserve a seat in the cafeteria.
FIT’s Book It webpage with detailed instructions on how to use LibCal Seats to make on-campus reservations.
EDUCAUSE Webinar with The New School
To that end, we touched based with The New School who used LibCal Seats to reopen computer labs, equipment rental spaces, and maker centers. They launched LibCal Seats, campus-wide, in just three weeks. If you’d like to learn how they did it, join us for this free EDUCAUSE webinar, and learn how Kayla and Marcus implemented LibCal Seats campus-wide.
Librarians are not only resourceful, but also inspiring. So many of your workarounds, implementations, and projects inspire others within your institution to do the same. You won’t believe how many emails we get from non-libraries saying things like, “We noticed our library on campus was using…. and we’d like to use it too!”
If you think LibCal Seats would be useful for other departments outside your Library or useful for campus or institution-wide deployment, spread the word! Share this handy help guide or forward this email along.
What another amazing Learning Lab! Last week, Sara Loree and Victoria Messana, volunteer librarians from the Librarian Reserve Corps, delivered an amazing presentation on how they used Springshare tools to put out a call for volunteers, organize those volunteers by location and speciality, and communicate important information with volunteers, researchers, and more. All to help stop the flood of misinformation that was taking place due to the pandemic.
Using LibWizard and LibCRM to put out a call for volunteers and then organizing those volunteers by speciality, location, etc… to create a really easily searchable database.
Creating a LibGuides CMS powered website and then having to revise it as time passed and scope became more defined.
Using LibGuides CMS Groups to create public-facing content and internal/private/restricted groups for volunteer intranet information.
Using LibAnswers ticketing queues to streamline questions and assigning team leads to specific queues.
Helpful tips and takeaways such as creating a style guide, organizational talking points, etc.
We’re huge 30 Rock fans and we were immediately drawn to this amazing CR&L article, Ain’t No Party Like a LibGuides Party, Because a LibGuides Party Is Mandatory, because not only is the content amazing but they reference a Liz Lemon quote. I mean, we could not resist. So we contacted the authors and asked them to deliver a Learning Lab in June, and they agreed! So mark your calendars for our next learning lab with UNC Charlotte’s guest speakers Natalie Ornat, Beth Auten, and Reese Manceaux.
A few months back, we announced an exciting partnership and integration with Lean Library. With the Lean Library browser plug-in, you can embed your LibGuides right at the point of need. Here’s how it works:
Your patrons download the Lean Library Plugin for their Chrome, Firefox, and other compatible web browsers;
Inside your Lean Library Admin Dashboard – you control which LibGuides display on specific websites;
So, if your patron navigates to scholar.google.com > your Google Scholar Advanced Searching LibGuide pops-up!
Patrons can read, dismiss, and continue on with their Google Scholar searching, with a better understanding on how to get full-text or peer-reviewed results. Talk about delivering library instruction right when they need it!
Google Scholar LibGuide displaying as a pop-up in Chrome via the Lean Library Browser plug-in
Increase your LibGuides Usage
Utah State University launched a pilot program with Lean Library to explore whether or not this integration would increase their LibGuides’ usage. And boy, did it.
They saw a 450% increase in views, in just one LibGuide, during their pilot study.
This is Just the Beginning
We started with LibGuides, but this is just the beginning. We plan on working with Lean Library to integrate LibChat into their browser plugin-in so patrons can not only receive instructional support at point-of-need… but with a simple click, they can get help from your staff right when they need it.
Explore the Lean Library Workflow for LibGuides – Live Webinars
Special guest speaker Jason Folkman from Utah State University will be doing two webinars in May to highlight their Lean Library/LibGuides integration! Lean Library’s Matt Hayes and Daniel Horvath will be on hand alongside Springy Talia to answer any of your technical questions.
Register Today: (All times listed in US Eastern Time)
Librarian Futures Survey – What Does the Future Hold?
Lean Library is looking into the future of the librarian/patron relationship. How can librarians connect with their patrons outside the library? What are the challenges students, researchers and faculty face that librarians could help support? Over the next few months, they’ll be speaking to librarians and academics all over the world to answer these questions. And they want to hear from you!
We had such a blast at this year’s ACRL virtual conference. And while we missed seeing all your faces, IRL, it was nice to chat with all… albeit virtually. Some of you swung by to ask questions, others watched our videos and downloaded our brochures. And to those of you that dropped in to leave a thank you note in our live chat, well you made our day.
Winners of the ACRL Giveaway
Probably our favorite part of the conference was picking the winners of our bookshop.org gift card giveaway. If you signed up for our mailing list, you were entered into a drawing to win a free $25 gift card – and we were giving five of them away. If you entered our drawing and were waiting to hear on the winners, we wanted to assure you that yes – we did pick the winners! We believe in true transparency here at Springshare, so we’d like to congratulate the following five winners of our bookshop.org giftcard giveaway! Each bookshop.org purchase supports a local bookstore – and they need our support now more than ever!
Kimberly Bailey, University of Pittsburgh
Nicole Eckroth, University of Mary
Cindy Strong, Seattle Pacific University
Judith Riney, Brescia University
Naomi Bishop, The University of Arizona
Congratulations winners and happy reading!
Sign-up to Receive Springshare Emails
If you’re like wait, what is the Springshare mailing list? Let us take a minute to clarify! The Springshare opt-in email allows you to receive monthly training enewsletter updates, SpringyNews newsletter, and promotional offers and new product announcements. You can sign-up for all three categories, or pick and choose what you’d like to receive and we promise you – we’ll only email you once a month/category. Don’t miss out on LibGuides tips & tricks in our SpringyNews newsletter, or upcoming training sessions that get filled-up quickly, or our announcements on new Springy tools and features.
Named Librarians of the Year by Library Journal, Elaine R. Hicks, Stacy Brody, and Sara Loree, founder and co-leads of the Librarian Reserve Corps, are helping researchers stem the tide of fake news during this global pandemic. The Librarian Reserve Corps was created in response to the World Health Organization’s need for timely and accurate COVID-19 research. Elaine, Stacy, and Sara quickly formed a group of volunteers to vet, index, and share literally tens of thousands of resources for the global medical community… all using Springshare tools.
… And We Get to Meet with Them!
Next week, join us for a webinar and meet LRC librarians Stacy Brody and Victoria Messana as they share how they’ve used LibGuides CMS, LibAnswers, LibWizard, and LibCRM to organize volunteers around the world as well as vet and share credible COVID-19 research with the global community.
We’re going fully digital at this year’s virtual ACRL Annual Conference (April 13 – 16). We’ve got 3D holograms. Be able to chat with your fave Springy using a VR headset. We’ve even got cutting edge Smell-o-Vision technology where you’ll be able to smell Mazen’s famous baklava when you come by our virtual exhibit booth! Okay, okay – none of that is true. Except the first sentence, we ARE exhibiting at this year’s ACRL virtual conference! And, and this is a big and, we have some awesome giveaways including five $20 giftcards to bookshop.org!
Finding Our Virtual Booth
First things first, make sure you can find our booth! That’s where we’ll be hanging out all week. From the ACRL virtual conference portal, click Exhibitors in the left column and scroll down (or control/cmd + F) to find Springshare. Favorite our booth so we’ll appear in your followed items. Here’s a quick video on how to find, favorite, and explore our booth!
No sound / 1min video duration
I’m At Your Booth – Now What?
We have Offers & Giveaways!
We’re offering two giveaways if you visit our virtual exhibit booth.
Win a $20 Giftcard – If you opt-in to receive emails to our mailing list, enter a giveaway to win one of five $20 Bookshop.org giftcards. Bookshop.org is a great way to shop conveniently online for books and support your local bookstore in the process. We’ll announce the winners of our drawing next week.
Get a Discount – Who doesn’t love a bargain? If you visit our booth and fill out a form, get 10% off any Springshare tool over $499 if you buy by June 30, 2021!
Talk to a Springy!
We’ll be manning our booth during the below hours, feel free to use the Live Chat tool to ask a question. If you want a live demo, we can send along a Zoom url for a quick 5-min product overview webinar.
Booth Coverage Hours: All times listed in US Eastern Time
Tue, April 13:
12:45pm – 1:45pm
2:00pm – 3:00pm
3:15pm – 4:15pm
4:30pm – 5:30pm
Wed, April 14 + Thu, April 15:
11:00am – 12:00pm
12:30pm – 1:45pm
2:00pm – 3:00pm
3:15pm – 4:15pm
4:30pm – 5:30pm
Fri, April 16:
11:00am – 12:00pm
12:15pm – 1:15pm
Watch Videos, Download Brochures & More!
If you like browsing at your own leisure, we have uploaded brochures, videos, and links to various websites. Take a few minutes and explore our site!
Will we ‘see’ you there?
The pandemic has drastically changed how we can see people and we sorely miss our time at conferences where we got to meet many of you in-person, answer your questions, hear your suggestions (many of which made their way into our products!), and have a chit-chat. And while we still can’t do exactly that right now, we can do this! So we hope to see you this week at ACRL’s virtual annual conference!
If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t do everything by ourselves… all the time. Not only is it a surefire way to burnout, but there is a high probability that things will get missed, overlooked, or steamrolled over. And that’s why Springshare is here to help. Last month we launched our new consulting services program to help you get the most out of your Springshare tools and bring your goals to fruition.
Really want a new LibGuides homepage redesign but you don’t have time to code up a new look & feel? We can help.
Doing a large scale rollout of LibCal across multiple libraries, spaces, and logistics and need help thinking about the bigger picture? We got you.
Do you need to get your LibAnswers system live ASAP and you don’t have time to learn about all the features and settings? We can set it up for you.
Do you have another plan, project, or goal and need our help? We’re here.
Bottomline, our consulting services are as robust as our tools – and our main goal is to help you succeed!
Consulting Packages – The Right Fit For Your Project
We’ll work with you to discuss your goals and ideas, explain how to configure and customize your system to meet those needs, and show you how to format data for the appropriate data imports we’ll do on your behalf.
During the project, we’ll review any existing sites or data that you’ll be adding to your system and provide prioritized email follow-up support related to the project. We’ll finish the project with a training session (with Q&A) focused on either admin or staff users.
In addition to everything in the “Setup for Success” package, we’ll also customize your site’s look and feel area with a custom header, footer, and stylesheet to coordinate with other institutional sites.
For LibGuides, we’ll also develop a customized homepage template and up to 5 different guide templates that can be used to create great looking content in your site.
Need us to do all the heavy lifting? We can set up your system, flip all the switches, and customize the look and feel so that you have a turnkey solution.
Through a series of meetings, we’ll discuss your needs and determine the setup needed. Our experts will take care of setup, build, and design. We’ll finish the project with two training sessions, one for admins and the other for staff users.
Arrange for customized training sessions for your staff, aligned to your institution’s needs or goals. Choose from one of our standard sessions or a training session completely designed around your workflows.
Get your staff solidly trained on the basics or go beyond for best practices or advanced customization.
Do you need help with a specific project outside of our packages? Our Springy experts can help you achieve any business goals at your library, so let’s talk.
Depending on your needs and requirements, we can figure out the best way to help your project succeed. Drop us a line – our experts are here for you.
All of the above options are designed with the goal of utilizing expert Springys to help you improve online engagement, navigate your community’s shift to digital, and engage users in remote learning service models!
These releases are on their way to you next week, and will be live in all regions by the end of the day on Friday, April 9. Read about LibCal | LibAnswers | LibApps | LibStaffer | LibInsight.
LibCal
Interactive Seat/Space Mapping
Our interactive Seat & Space booking module is here! With this new feature, your students and patrons can now select their desired Seat or Space with interactive maps that show real-time availability. For full information on this optional module, see our recent blog post.
Navigate the building map to see bookable areas & their availability.
Clickable “hotspots” will show users real-time availability for their desired Seat or Space availability. Hostpot colors indicate the status of each field and are customizable.
When clicking on a bookable Seat or Space, an information bubble will show availability, capacity, Seat/Space image (if it exists on the Seat or Space record) and power & accessibility options (if enabled).
“Enter” a building wing by clicking on it to see its spaces, tables, computers, etc.
Users can book a preferred Space or Seat based on its location.
If a Space has bookable seats inside, clicking on its area will open a new map showing those options. Any clickable “hotspot” can be linked to open another map if desired.
Users will get a clear sense of where everything is located before even entering the building or floor.
Receive a directional map on the booking confirmation public page and email. Directional maps will be automatically generated for booked locations from your interactive maps.
Our consulting team will work closely with you to produce beautiful, scalable maps that look great on a desktop or on mobile, then we’ll add interactive areas to them: your defined study, event, and meeting spaces; individual armchairs or tables; or study carrels. Each hotspot area will be associated with corresponding Zones, Spaces, or Seats in LibCal. Ask us to learn how to get started!
Appointment Direction Maps
We’ve added the ability to associate a map image to Appointment locations and individual Appointment users’ Directions field. Head to Admin > Appointments > Manage Locations > Edit Location to associate a map image with an Appointment location or Appointments > My Settings > Appointment Settings to associate a map image with an Appointments user’s “Directions” field. When a patron books an Appointment on the public pages, a link to map image(s) will be displayed on the Booking form and Confirmation page next to that Appointment location and/or Directions field. It’s also possible to include links to Appointment location maps in Appointment-related emails via new Email tags.
Event Directional Maps
You can also associate a map image for Event locations! If a map image is set up for an Event Location in Admin > Events > Event Locations > Edit Location, a link to the map images will be shown on the public Event page, if that location is an “Onsite Location.” As with Appointments, map links can be added to Event-related emails with Email Tags.
But wait, there’s more! Our Online Appointments & Events Cisco Webex integration is here! The integration will work the same way our current Microsoft Teams & Zoom integrations do in LibCal. You will first need to connect the integration from the Admin > Integrations > Online Appointments & Events page. After the Cisco Webex integration is successfully connected, users will be able to authorize the integration for their account for use with Appointments and Events.
Other
Appointments
We’ve added new selections for “Patron Must Book in Advance” (36 hours, 2 weeks & 3 weeks) and “Patron Booking Window” (1 day, 2 days & 3 days) settings for Appointment users. Go to Appointments > My Settings to set these options.
Events
A new LibAuth Event calendar type is available. When this type is chosen for a calendar, a LibAuth sign-in will be required to view the public calendar and corresponding Event pages. Head to Events > Modify/View Calendar. > Settings > Calendar Settings to choose this new calendar type.
You can now limit which Spaces are available for “Onsite Location” Event bookings! Go to Admin > Events > Space Locations or Admin > Space & Equipment > Edit Space to change whether a Space can be booked for an Event and therefore appear in the “Onsite Location” selection list.
Seats/Spaces
There are new padding duration options available (5 & 10 minutes). Navigate to Admin > Spaces & Equipment > Spaces & Categories > Edit Category > Booking Limits to select one of these new padding options for a Space Category.
You can now add intro text to the “New Reservation” (/r/new) page! Go to Admin > System Settings > Language Options > Custom Language > Spaces & Equipment > New Reservation Page Intro Text to set this up.
The ability to set LibAuth group level rules at the individual Space location level is now available when LibAuth is set to be used across all locations on the Admin > Spaces & Equipment > LibAuth page.
Early Check In (or not!). When checking in a patron on the admin side of LibCal, a new prompt will appear if the check in is attempted before the selected check-in window for the location. Admin users can decide to allow early check ins or cancel the action and wait until it is within the correct time frame that was set on the Admin > Spaces & Equipment > Edit Location > Seat/Space CheckIn panel.
Spaces stats reports will now display total hours rather than total minutes. Head to Stats > Spaces to see your Spaces statistical reports.
We’ve added an option to retrieve the Name & Email from Exchange (when possible) to display when using synched Exchange bookings for a Space. Go to Admin > Spaces & Equipment > Edit Location > Outlook > Exchange > Outlook/Exchange Bookings in LibCal to enable this feature.
The API endpoints for Space bookings will now return the date and time bookings were created.
Other
We’ve added Irish to the public language selections that are currently available in the page footer.
The April release is on its way, and is bringing several oft-requested features to LibAnswers! With this release we’re thrilled to bring Coverage Reports to LibChat, which will make it easy for site Admins to see the amount of chat coverage their staff provides. We’re also excited to begin introducing a series of updates intended to improve chat stability and eliminate our reliance on third party cookies during chat. For the full breakdown of everything rolling out in this release, head to the Springshare Lounge to view the release notes.
Chat Monitoring & Coverage Reports
We’re introducing a new reporting center for Chat Monitoring Activity. These reports will be available to site admins in an LA site; they’re designed to provide an in-depth breakdown of the amount of time that your staff have spent monitoring various chat departments in your LibAnswers system, and how many chats folks have claimed during those time periods. We will begin gathering data when we release the update, and the total amount of coverage time and total number of chats answered will be available beginning from this date onward. These reports will also include specific logs that represent the login and logout times of each chat staff member as they monitor various chat departments, and this portion of the data will be available on a rolling basis for up to the past 3 months, beginning on the date of release. Once the release is complete in your region, Admins will be able to view this new suite of information at LibChat > Coverage.
Chat Server Updates
With this code update, we’re releasing the first of a series of changes that will chat stability and connectivity. Over the next several releases, we will complete the process of moving all chat server traffic from their current domains (which can include libchat.com domains, as well as custom domains like libanswers.mysite.edu) to a libanswers.com domain. In doing this, our focus is on reducing and then eliminating the issues presented by third party cookies in chat, which we feel is critical as most web browsers are moving toward increased user privacy.
With our current release, all chat traffic for users in sites on a *.libanswers.com domain will move to libanswers.com, which will eliminate the use of third party cookies for these sites. In our next release, we plan to update the URL of the LibChat dashboard (and only the LibChat dashboard) for sites on custom domains to a libanswers.com domain, which will entirely eliminate the need for third party cookies.
Good to know: If your site has previously needed to add our chat server to an approved domain list (cascade.libchat.com), now is an ideal time to also ask your IT department to add our new server address. These vary depending on the region you’re in: chat-us.libanswers.com (US region, which includes South America and Africa), chat-ca.libanswers.com (Canada), chat-eu.libanswers.com (European region), or chat-au.libanswers.com (Australia/Pacific Region).
And Coming Soon…
We’re hard at work revamping several of our back-end search features, in an effort to bring you a faster and more intuitive search interface! Our first order of business is updating the chat transcript search page; in our next release, we’ll be overhauling our underlying search engine to bring you even more powerful chat transcript searching.
We’ve added the Innovative Polaris authentication to our growing LibAuth authentication protocols. Just go to your LibApps page > Admin > LibAuth Authentication and add a new Polaris configuration. Please note that Polaris integration is not yet available for Pickup Manager.
Customize the look and feel of your Schedule widgets with CSS! Set this up at Admin > Schedule Settings > Edit Schedule > Widgets where you will see a new “Custom JS/CSS Code” panel.
The ability to filter the Time Clock Report by the Organizational Hierarchy is now available in your LibStaffer Reports. Head to Reports > Time Clock to make use of these new filters when running this report.
Stacked Chart Option for Numeric Fields in Dashboards
We’ve added the “Display Stacked Chart” option for Custom/Shared Datasets with Numeric field Y-Axis and Single/Multi-Select fields for Data Labels. This enables a stacked view for your Select fields so that you can see the total for each Select option.
That’s it for this round of updates from Springy HQ. We would like to thank you, our user community, for sharing all your great ideas with us! We love making them a reality and look forward to bringing you many more improvements in 2021. We are always here for you if have any suggestions or questions.
Last week we had the pleasure of sitting down, albeit virtually, with three amazing librarians to talk about virtual chat reference and the importance of having support from a regional, and global, chat cooperative. Caitlin Kenney (Engagement and Education Services Coordinator at the Western New York Library Resources Council) and Cornell University Librarians Leah Dodd (Research Lead Librarian), and Virginia Cole (Archaeology, Classics, History, and Medieval Studies Librarian) joined us for a panel discussion to discuss the WNYLRC cooperative and Cornell University’s experience doing local, regional, and even global chat reference.
In case you missed it, you’re in luck! We recorded the session, along with presenter slides, so you can watch and download all from the Springshare Learning Lab website.
Takeaways
The benefits of creating chat fallback so patrons chatting with the library start locally but if their library isn’t available, it rolls up to the Western New York LRC regional cooperative -> and then lastly the global chat cooperative for 24/7 backup.
Using historical statistics to make sure chat staffing is optimized.
The importance of feedback for quality control and using chat transcripts for training purposes.
Using tags to tag transcripts with followed-up, reviewed, etc. to keep an accurate eye on chats for quality control.
Springing into Action – The Librarian Reserve Corps (LRC) Thursday, April 29, 1:00pm – 2:20pm The Librarian Reserve Corps (LRC) was founded in March 2020 to provide critical librarian time, skills, and resources to the growing need for quality information in response to the global pandemic. They quickly recognized the need to have a web presence to provide information to partners and volunteers and a central platform to manage projects. As librarians who used Springshare products in their home institutions, LRC’s Co-Directors thought to reach out to Springshare for support. Springshare responded quickly, donating access to a suite of products to support LRC’s response efforts. Throughout the past year, LRC has combined LibGuides, LibAnswers, and LibWizard to manage volunteers and launch new initiatives. Read more in our blog post.
Last month we asked librarians and library workers to share their #MyLibLifeReality moments with us, knowing it was a bit of a long shot even though we loved the idea.
Watch Springy Will’s #MyLibLifeReality video
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed the absence of videos in our March newsletter. And, well, you can probably guess where this is going — sometimes things don’t pan out as you hope!
Every programming and outreach librarian can relate to how we’re feeling right now. But while we didn’t get many responses, we’re always ones to put a positive spin on things. So we wanted to post two three highlights/bits of good news:
We received a great video from Springy Will, who shared a game he played with fellow coworkers before coming on board with us. Springys for the win!
Because we believe in the important work Black Girls CODE is doing, we still made a $250 donation – the maximum amount we proposed for #MyLibLifeReality submissions.
(3/24 update) Oscar R. Lanza-Galindo matched our donation! A big thanks to you, Oscar, for expanding the impact of our project.
You can watch Springy Will’s video on YouTube, and we hope it brings a little smile to your face! And if you’re looking to support the future of women of color in STEM fields, you can also donate to Black Girls CODE from their website.
We hope you all have a great week! And, as always, we are here for you if you have any questions.
Utah State University launched a pilot program with Lean Library to explore whether or not this integration would increase their LibGuides’ usage. And boy, did it. 
![take the survey now](http://<img class="wp-image-14601" style="width: 150px;" src="/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/survey.png" alt="">)
We’ll work with you to discuss your goals and ideas, explain how to configure and customize your system to meet those needs, and show you how to format data for the appropriate data imports we’ll do on your behalf. 
In addition to everything in the “Setup for Success” package, we’ll also customize your site’s look and feel area with a custom header, footer, and stylesheet to coordinate with other institutional sites.
Need us to do all the heavy lifting? We can set up your system, flip all the switches, and customize the look and feel so that you have a turnkey solution.
Arrange for customized training sessions for your staff, aligned to your institution’s needs or goals. Choose from one of our standard sessions or a training session completely designed around your workflows.
Do you need help with a specific project outside of our packages? Our Springy experts can help you achieve any business goals at your library, so let’s talk.
