Springshare Blog

Ginna Nicolas | October 23, 2019

Watch & Learn: Three Librarians Use LibWizard For Training & Assessment Needs

Special guest librarians share experiences with libwizard

The One to Watch.

There’s considerable buzz surrounding Springshare’s LibWizard because, like a good tool, it does the job. The full LibWizard package features custom forms, surveys, quizzes, and tutorials — all with an unlimited scope so you don’t have to limit your imagination or shorten your to-do list. In truth, it does many many jobs.

The surest way to cast light on what LibWizard is capable of helping you tackle — is to give working librarians a chance to present how they’ve set LibWizard to task! We featured their ideas in three recent webinars where, as special guest speakers, they were able to share their individual experiences with how LibWizard helps them address their high-level priorities. Your peer librarians provide insight into how they designed a process to

Train Student Workers at the University of Guelph-Humber
Commit to Student Assessment at Prince Georges Community College
and Train Staff at Wilmington University

If you didn’t get a chance to attend, we’ve got you covered! We have the recordings here for you so you can watch, learn, and begin to think of the things LibWizard can help you do at your library! You’ll soon discover that your checklist is more than doable with an efficient workhorse by your side.

Sue Hunter Extends the Training of Her Student Workers with LibWizard Components.

The University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, Ontario has roughly 5,000 undergraduate students. Sue Hunter, the Acting Manager of Library Services, oversees a Research Support Peers program. There are 10 RSPs on staff who are in their 2nd to 4th years of study and who come from all 7 academic programs on campus. They staff an information desk in the Learning Commons, which is separate from the library. They work to provide

Computer Support
Learning Support
Career Support
Research Support

Sue says,

The RSPs are really an important component of the library’s public service because they are the bridge between the students and library services and they help to extend the hours for research assistance by working in the evening and on weekends.

Watch the recording of her webinar to learn more about how she uses LibWizard to train this invaluable staff of student employees beyond their dedicated training day. Sue uses LibWizard’s surveys, quizzes, and tutorials to continue to build and reinforce the RSPs knowledge. This helps them to answer questions, provide guidance, and support the library with excellent service skills.

Marianne Giltrud Ventures Into the Wizarding World of Assessment.

Assessment of student learning ranks very high on the must-do list of many libraries. Marianne Giltrud, an Assistant Professor and Instruction Librarian at Prince Georges Community College in Maryland, notes that she began her assessment journey back in 2017 by designing a Pre-Test and Post-Test with the quiz feature in LibWizard. She then decided to embed the quizzes in a private LibGuide she built.

Learn more about how and where Marianne deployed this guide with her pre- and post-test. Plus, hear about how Marianne and her team created a Research Tutorial with LibWizard.

Marianne shares that, what they built is

…a multimedia tutorial using Adobe Captivate and then we changed the Shockwave files into YouTube files and we embedded the YouTube in a LibGuide.

The tutorial is constructed so professors can cherry-pick sections they want to be taken.
It is designed to allow the students to re-take it up to 5 times so that learning is a process.
Marianne also customized it so that upon completion, certificates get sent to the professors.

Watch the recording to see how Marianne’s creativity and LibWizard come together for the library, faculty, and students at Prince Georges Community College.

Melissa Jones is Training the Library Staff with Ease.

Melissa Jones is the Learning Commons Librarian and LibGuides Manager at Wilmington University in Delaware. She has been using LibWizard forms, surveys, and tutorials for students, faculty, and staff since 2016.

Since she is so well versed in how LibWizard can be used, it wasn’t much of a leap for her to envision how she could use LibWizard in conjunction with LibGuides as a training tool and also as a knowledge base for their staff so they have something to refer back to. Melissa needed to tackle a couple of challenges:

She went from being the sole daytime staff member to suddenly having additional people on her team whom she needed to train with no organized training process in place.
The needs of the students are very situational and can change depending on what technology they’re working with, what they’re required to do for their courses and many other factors. So there was no way to prepare the new staff for every possible scenario they might face.
Much of the staff are part-time and they can only come to the library during their shifts. So the learning had to be accessible to staff while they are working.

Watch the recording of Melissa’s webinar to discover how she

…came up with something for training that would cover the skills for the most common tasks they needed to know, and the model needed to have assessments to check for understanding, and include a knowledge base so they would have a place to access general information and find answers in case they were working by themselves.

Springshare knows that like these awesome librarians — you, too, have a number of projects on your plate that have been brainstormed into life. See how LibWizard can help you get them off the ground.

Category: Client Stories, General, LibWizard |

Ginna Nicolas | October 16, 2019

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King University Uses LibWizard To Create A Game Focused On Information Literacy

Looking For A Game-Changer?

In addition to their responsibilities in the library, many librarians also spend a substantial amount of time in the classroom. For those who tackle the incoming Freshman each year, teaching Information Literacy can be a sincere challenge. The difficulty is two-fold. How do you stay motivated and enthusiastic when you’re teaching the same material, asking the same questions and getting similar answers multiple times a day — year after year? We know if the instructor is not engaged, there’s little hope the students will be. Given that scenario, how do you instruct and prepare your students, many of whom don’t have much experience with libraries? How do you share the fundamentals that will help them with the entirety of their college careers and beyond? The answer might be… to put on your game face!

Emily Krug is an Instructional Services Librarian and Assistant Professor of Library Services at King University in Bristol, Tennessee. She shared with us her experiences as she created her game, The Battle for the Oval Kingdom, designed to introduce the concepts of Information Literacy. We’re inspired by her creativity and are thrilled to relay her story.

The Name Of The Game Is Innovation.

The first part of the equation is a teaching schedule that involves a lot of critical information to be shared in back-to-back sessions with 80 Freshman students in each. Complicate that with zero class transition time resulting in 45-minutes classes that are really 35 minutes. How do we make all that equal success? Shake things up. Come at the problem from a different angle. Don’t be afraid to try something new. Emily recalled, the origin story for her game, The Battle for the Oval Kingdom, came from the intersection of two exciting sources.

The idea for the game, The Battle for the Oval Kingdom, came because of a professional development day that I participated in through the Mid-Atlantic Library Alliance. For the spring 2018 meeting, we invited Tasha Squires, who is a middle school librarian in Downers Grove, IL. She had created a game as a winter reading program for her middle school students and had won an award for the game. She presented and gave us a basic structure for how we could create something similar.

The other influencing factor was a session at the Library Collective Annual Gathering in March 2018, which takes place in Knoxville, TN, every year. At that session, participants played a game by Matt Finch called “Battle for Library Island,” which was essentially a roleplaying game designed to help libraries think through strategic planning for library services. Add to these two inspiring professional development opportunities the fact that my husband and I are avid board gamers, you can see why building a game was something I wanted to take on.

Her goal was to build a game “…in such a way that students could complete most of it outside class but also compete against each other for prizes.” Emily knew she needed the game to

introduce students to the concept of being information literate
and also to get students to come to the library in their first semester

In 2017, Emily was looking into LibWizard because they wanted increased “flexibility and a cleaner look for their online instructional program.” Because they were already using LibGuides, it was an easy leap to add LibWizard to build tutorials for their online courses. When the game was forming in her imagination in 2018, she was already armed with LibWizard and decided to use it as her tool for the build.

Start With A Good Game Plan.

Emily thinks back to recall the creative process and said,

I initially built the Quests for the game using Forms because the Quests themselves were simple questions. Most Quests had a short paragraph themed on the game followed by some sort of activity that the students had to complete.

Most of the Quests used text boxes for answers, but one Quest that required the students to come to the library in small groups used the file upload field so that students could upload a selfie that they took with a librarian.

One thing I particularly liked about the file upload field was that it works really well on a phone, which was how most of our students were completing the Quests.

Knowing the usage habits of your participants is key and an excellent indicator of how committed Emily and the King University Library is to having a successful outcome for this endeavor.

Emily wanted the forms to be embedded as an iframe widget so she used more of her creative energy to devise a workaround iframe code to put the forms into their learning management system.

Part of what made it work is that it makes nods to things like The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, but it’s not using those characters. I wrote a screenplay for a short video introducing the game, and I created characters and a mythology around the game. Our villain is a Sauron-esque warrior called the Dark Lord Obfuscar whose primary goal is to make it harder to evaluate information. The citizens of the Oval Kingdom seek the help of the Order of Librarius, who have discovered the ancient practices of evaluating information in a tome called the Codex of Bibliog.

The team names are all plays on buildings around campus. That’s one of the things that I think made it work: I tried to incorporate our campus as much as possible into the game. We had a lot of support in that regard. Our Director of Student Life was in the video, our Provost agreed to play the villain, and someone from our marketing department filmed and edited the video.

As far as advertising and implementing goes, we didn’t have to do much advertising because it was tied to a class. The students received a grade for completing the main Quests, but we built in the competition through other game elements such as strategy cards and bonus cards. The Dean of Students is in charge of the course, and he’s a former librarian, so he and his team were excited about us trying something a bit new.

More Than A Numbers Game.

The Battle for the Oval Kingdom is a success. Emily shared the fact that students who participated last year have already come to ask her if they will be playing the game again. And, while she did also get some great feedback from a short survey she distributed on the awards day, we know that the high level of student engagement she cultivated is invaluable. Emily reflects on her experiences as she looks to this year’s batch of incoming Freshman. There are some changes to the set up of the Freshman Seminar at King Univesity this year that meant more sections, which results in smaller class sizes but Emily continues with the game as a solid component of their teaching strategy. She said,

While we could have more easily managed the class sizes this year, we don’t have the staffing to add 10 extra instruction sessions in the fall semester, so we decided to continue using the game as our information literacy outreach for Freshman Seminar.

Several of the Quests are the same or similar to last year’s, but we did change a few big things. For starters, I actually moved the Quests from the Forms feature of LibWizard to the Quizzes feature because I found out about the certificate of completion feature in Quizzes and Tutorials. One important piece of feedback that we received last year was that students couldn’t always tell when they had completed each Quest because it would reload if they refreshed the page in the Learning Management System. By moving the Quests to Quizzes, I was able to include a customized certificate of completion, and the students can save that certificate in case there is any question about whether they did the Quest.

We also extended the time for students to complete the game. Last year, we did the entire thing over the course of a week and a half, which included the Labor Day holiday. One thing we heard from student feedback was that it felt rushed.

Imagine students wanting to spend more time working on what is essentially an assignment! But perhaps in all the fun, they’d forgotten that part. They’ve really done it at King University Library. Emily Krug and the teaching librarians have come up with a fun way to approach Freshman Information Literacy and the winner is… everyone.

Category: Client Stories, General, LibWizard |

Neil Levine | October 7, 2019

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Code Release: New LibCal, LibGuides, LibAuth, LibInsight, LibWizard, LibAnswers, LibStaffer and LibCRM features coming your way!

It’s the time of year for both tricks and treats, but we’re only serving up treats for our Springy friends in the form of new features and enhancements. This round of releases includes blog searching in LibGuides, connecting your Hours module with your Calendars in LibCal and Schedules in LibStaffer, language translation of all LibStaffer screens with the click of a button, a new Ranking field in LibWizard, and a whole lot more!

These releases are on their way to you this week, and will be live in all regions by the end of the day on Friday, October 11, 2019.

LibCal

Calendars/Events

Features

You can now associate library/department hours from the Hours module with an event Calendar. While editing a Calendar on the admin side of the system, go to Settings > Calendar Settings > ‘Linked to LibCal Opening Hours’. Choose any of your Hours module locations to link to this Calendar. Once an Hours location is linked to a Calendar, you’ll see an alert (shown below) if an event falls outside of that library/department’s open hours.
We’ve enhanced the public page ‘Card View’ to allow for featured event images to be displayed. There are two display options available for the card view: either display the featured event image on top of the event card or display the featured image inside of the event card (to the left of the event description). The current card view with no featured image will still be available for the public page display.
We’ve added an email preview to each of the Calendar/Event email templates. While editing a Calendar, head to Settings > Email Settings to see the email preview in each section.
We’ve added ‘Cancelled’ registration records to the ‘View User History’ list available on the ‘Registrations’ tab for events requiring registrations.
Add a Google Maps display of the location of your events using the new Geolocation option on the Create Event screen! You can set Geolocation at the System (Admin > System Settings), Campus (Admin > Calendars > Campus > Add/Edit Campus), and Event (Add Event > Geolocation section) levels, and even pull this info via the API.
We’ve enhanced the Twitter text entry for events to allow for 280 characters to be entered.
We’ve removed the date restriction for creating events. Previously, events could only be entered for the current date and 30 days previous to that.
If you link a Space to an event, you will now see a warning that canceling the Space booking from the Spaces availability grid does not affect the Event listing. The Space will stil be listed in the Event until/unless you modify it from the Edit Event screen.
A missing language tag has been found! The warning that displays on the public page when viewing an Equipment/Spaces private category URL is now an option on the Admin > System Settings > Language Options page.

Fixes

We’ve modified the sorting of dates for the multi-date picker when creating an event to sort by date instead of alphabetically.
We’ve corrected an issue where featured event images were not properly displaying when events were posted to Twitter.
We’ve also fixed an issue on the public event page where the button to share the event in a Twitter post was not working.
We’ve fixed an issue where the later events in a series linked event would not display the seats remaining banner on the public event page card view.
We’ve modified the publishing workflow process where, if it is disabled for a Calendar (after having been enabled), only events in the ‘Submit for Review’ status will be published. Previously all events, even those that were still in the ‘Draft’ mode, would get published when turning off the publishing workflow.
If an event is part of a published recurring series and is later put back in “Draft” status, it now correctly does not display when a user on the public side of the system uses the “Show more date” option in that recurring event.
We’ve fixed an issue where the Reply-To settings for event confirmation emails was not CC’ing the Event Organizer, though it was set to do so.
We’ve resolved an issue where waitlist registrants for an event were unable to cancel their registration from the link sent in the waitlist confirmation email.

Billing

Features

We’ve modified the status and processing of refunds for in-person payments. Now, when cancelling a booking or registration that was paid in person, the status will change to ‘Refund Due’ instead of ‘Refunded’ as the refund may not actually occur at the time of cancellation.
We’ve modified the public booking page confirmation link that is sent via email to display any cost adjustments that were made to a booking.

Fixes

We’ve corrected an issue where accepting an in-person payment was clearing bookings for mediated equipment items.
We’ve corrected an issue with multiple seat registrations when accepting in-person payments where the accept in person payment action icon was showing for all registrations besides the primary one.
The ‘Payment Receipt’ and ‘Payment Refund’ email templates are now available for Equipment & Spaces if only using in-person payments.

Appointments

Features

The ‘Type’ field will no longer display on the public appointments booking confirmation page if no appointment categories are in use.
We’ve added a Language token for the “Appointments” breadcrumb, which appears when you are on the appointment page for a particular user or location. (It does not appear if you are on the main Appointments page, where you would select a location.) Head to Admin > System Settings > Language Options > Appointments to customize this breadcrumb.

Fixes

The “No preference” option correctly removes available times when all users in the group are busy, since no one is actually being available.
We’ve corrected an issue where all appointment categories were showing on the widget for the ‘Only myself, but a particular location/group’ option, even if some categories were not associated with any groups.
When using a widget, if you choose a member of a group and they have no available times, the “Sorry, there are no times available” message appears…and is now correctly removed when you select another user who does have available times.
Appointment form answers now correctly appear in the Description field in your calendar when using the iCal feed to import appointment information.
The {{{TIME_DATE_DIRECTIONS}}} and {{DIRECTIONS}} keywords in the ‘Rescheduled Email to Patron’ template are now working correctly.

Equipment & Spaces

Features

You can now search by an equipment item’s barcode on the ‘Check Out’ tab! Head to Equipment > Check Out to see this new feature.
On the ‘Booking Limits’ page, you will now see an option to restrict the amount of time that needs to elapse between bookings, thus limiting the option for back-to-back bookings.
Limit a booking window to the current day only if a value of zero is entered into the ‘Window Limit’ field on the ‘Booking Limits’ page for an equipment or space category.
The cost (if applicable) and ability to edit that cost now appear on the mediation approval page.
You can now confirm a booking on the admin side that normally requires email verification in the Spaces Booking Explorer.
We’ve added the ability to copy a booking from the Spaces Booking Explorer. Head to Spaces > Booking Explorer to check out this new feature.
Tired of having to leave the Spaces or Equipment availability page to add hours exceptions? Well, no more! We’ve made life easier by allowing you to add exceptions right from the Equipment and Spaces availability grid. Go to Spaces or Equipment > Availability > click the ‘Add Booking’ dropdown > Add Hours Exception.
If you sync spaces to Google Calendar and there is a failure when trying to set up the initial connection, you’ll now see a helpful error message with the reason why the failure occurred.

Fixes

We’ve corrected an issue where the ‘Make Another Booking’ button on the public booking page would only return to the same category that was used for the previously booked item if a friendly URL was set for that category.
We’ve fixed an issue where deleting a master item record would cause any child record to give an ‘Invalid master item id’ error when trying to edit. The process has been modified where if child items exist for a master item record, a modal will appear alerting the user that the item cannot be deleted because there are child items linked to it since it is the master item record, and that another master item needs to be assigned to the child items before it can be deleted.
We’ve modified the email template preview for when the {{times}} tag is in use to display a ‘-‘ character instead of the word ‘to’ in the preview since that is what is sent in the actual email to patrons. Go to Admin > Equipment & Spaces > Edit a Location > Email Templates.
If you have a recurring space bookings where one or more of the bookings were cancelled, and then an event is created from the booking, it will no longer show the cancelled bookings when creating the event.
Booking minimum durations are now being considered when booking a space through a widget.
Space locations/categories with LibAuth enabled no longer have per day duration limits applied to bookings of a single space across multiple days.
We’ve corrected an issue where the internal note field for bookings would not save when an editing an existing booking.

Misc.

Features

We’ve added the ability to switch the language in use on the public pages. The languages available for selection are those that are found in Admin > System Settings > Language Options under the ‘Base Language’ drop down.
Welsh has been added to our Base Language selection.
We’ve added a new ‘Regular User Permissions’ tab under Admin > Accounts > Regular User Permissions. The only permission currently there is for the Booking Explorer; we will be adding more options in future.
We’ve added role/landmark navigation and a skip navigation link to the Admin side of the system that allows clients to bypass the main menu navigation bar (the orange bar at the top) when using a screen reader.

Fixes

Custom text in the ‘Today’s Hours’ widget now correctly displays once (vs. twice).

Upcoming LibCal Training Sessions:

Planning Your LibCal Site Workshop
Holiday Hours in LibCal (Training Tidbit)
Setting Up Spaces and Adding Equipment

Also check out our recorded sessions!

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LibGuides

Blog Content Searching

A lot of you have asked to be able to search the content of your system and guide blogs, and with this code release, you can! You can add a tab or bento box to your system search in LibGuides that returns results from both the system blog and any publicly-available guide blog pages. You’ll also see a new search box on every blog page that allows you to search for posts right within the blog.

Adding Blogs to Your System Search

Go to Admin > Look & Feel > Page Layout > Search > Search Results Customization to add your Blog content to your system search as a new tab or bento option.

Search Within a Blog

Whether on your system blog or a guide blog page, you’ll now see a search box that allows you to search just the posts in that blog!

Smaller fixes and features

LTI: We updated the LTI Preview tool so that you can test your metadata even if you have a failover guide in place. Go to LibApps > Admin > LTI Tool Builder > LTI Automagic > LTI Page Builder and click the Preview button at the bottom of the section to preview how your LTI tool will work inside your LMS.
Blog Posts: We fixed an issue where the Post to Social toggle was set to Yes on blog posts when the blog default was set to No.
Guides: We have prevented the reuse of boxes from guides whose sharing is set to None. We also prevented Regular users from being able to reuse boxes on unpublished guides that they do not have access to. Regular users can still reuse boxes from unpublished guides that they own or edit. Admins can still reuse boxes from any unpublished guides, since they have access to all guides.
We fixed an issue that was causing some old domains to forward to /index.php, which was preventing a formal “change of address” from being completed with Google.

Upcoming LibGuides Training Sessions:

Sessions with times optimized for Australia, Asia, and New Zealand time zones:
- Building a LibGuide
- Best Practices: Building a Storage/Reusable Content Guide
Sesion with times optimized for European/African time zones: Planning Your LibGuides Site Workshop
Find It, Replace It (Training Tidbit)
Creating a Library Homepage with LibGuides CMS (and an Advanced session!)

Also check out our recorded sessions!

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LibWizard

New Features

We’ve added some useful features such as a new ranking field, the ability to limit number of submissions for Forms / Surveys / Quizzes / Tutorials, and the ability to add an introduction to notification emails.

Ranking Field

Ranking allows you to do just that! Add items to your Surveys, Quizzes, or Tutorials asking your users to rank the choices you enter from highest to lowest preference, release date, or whatever else makes sense for the question you’re asking.

Limit Number of Submissions

It’s here: the ability to set a limit on how many times (overall) a Form, Survey, Quiz, or Tutorial (F/S/Q/T) can be submitted! While editing an item, go to Options > Submission Behavor. The last option in that section is ‘Set Submission limit’ – check that box , enter the limit you’d like, and click Save Changes. The F/S/Q/T will no longer accept submissions when that limit has been reached. Instead, users will see a “Page is not available. Maximum form submissions reached.” message, letting them know the F/S/Q/T is closed.

Add Introduction Text to Notification Emails

Include a brief introduction or message to the submission notification emails for Forms, Surveys, Quizzes and Tutorials. You’ll find this section under Options > Submission behavior > Advanced Email Settings.

Forms, Surveys, Quizzes, and Tutorials

Features and Fixes

The Grid question type is now more mobile friendly! If you are looking at a LibWizard item with a Grid question on a mobile device, it now displays differently. Instead of attempting to recreate the grid on a tiny screen, each of the left hand options is displayed with its own section of checkboxes of the items that normally run across the top.
Pre-filled URLs are now case insensitive. For example, myform?myGenre=fiction and myform?mygenre=fiction both work.
If a Form has the label position set to “top” and if you encounter an error (such as missing fields), it would display a confusing error message when you try to save. The error message now specifies the actual error.
On the Thank You screen, users can enter multiple emails (separated by commas) to get a copy of results.
‘Display back button’ under ‘Quiz Options’ now works properly for Quizzes migrated from v1 to v2.
You can no longer skip slides with required questions by using the Tutorials menu.
We fixed an issue where selected options in checkbox fields were cleared when a field rule was activated to display another (hidden) checkbox field.
When users enter their email address on the ‘Thank You’ screen to receive a copy of results, a copy of the email is no longer sent to email addresses defined in the ‘Conditional to’ section of fields in that Form/Survey/Quiz/Tutorial.
Field rules for Ranking fields no longer have a “jump to” action, as it was being triggered at really inconvenient times, such as when you were in the middle of ranking items. (Show and Hide are still options.)
Tutorial menus now correctly respect the capitalization you’ve given your slide titles.
Changing the font family under Options > Look and Feel > Page Fonts and Colors now correctly applies that font family to all elements on the page, including radio and checkbox options.
If you embed a PDF in a Tutorial slide, it now displays properly when using the Edge browser.
Field rules now work properly if you enter a multiple choice option of ‘Other’ (typing it in as an option vs. using the “Add ‘Other’ as a choice” option).
If you create a tutorial based off another existing tutorial that has field rules, those field rules are now correctly copied over.
We corrected the referrer of a LibAuth enabled form.
We fixed an issue where in v2 you couldn’t copy forms with certain fields rules originally created in v1.
Surveys, Quizzes, and Tutorials that were created in v1 and had the last page break removed no longer give errors when loaded in v2.
Dates typed into date fields remain as typed in all regions vs. changing to the previous day.
If you use HTML in multiple choice field options, it does not render anywhere except on the public form.

Submission Reports

Features and Fixes

Multi-select checkbox fields now have a pipe delimiter between each choice in exported .csv reports.
We’ve fixed an issue in Reports where, after exporting a chart, you would get a blank page if you navigated to another section of the reporting area (e.g., Cross Tab or Data Table).
You can now to run Cross Tab reports with Safari and Edge for forms that only have two multi-choice fields.
The Cross Tab report now properly displays the Rating field.
Grids with empty rows submitted are now graded correctly in Quizzes and Tutorials.

Accessibility

Fixes and Improvements

Screen readers now read the intended date format required for a field, such as MM-DD-YYYY (read as “Date must be in MM dash DD dash YYYY format”) and YYYY/MM/DD (“Date must be in YYYY slash MM slash DD format”).
The Dashboard’s “Your Recent Activity” > Description column no longer has anchor tags around the description text, which prevents screenreaders from reading empty href content (if there is no description for a particular item).
Focused actionable items – such as links, buttons, and tabs – now have an outline.
We’ve updated the link colors on the admin side to ensure the color contrast is over 4.5:1.

Admin Settings

Features and Fixes

You may now add multiple external CSS/JS files for form customization under Admin > System Settings > Custom CSS/JS.
‘Import LibApps Account’ under LibWizard > Admin > Accounts only includes active accounts in LibApps.
Each user’s LibWizard account level now correctly displays within your LibApps > My Account > Account Permissions list.

Upcoming LibWizard Training Sessions:

Move to LibWizard v2 and take advantage of all of the functionality listed above!
Five x Five: Survey Tools (5 tips in 5 minutes each!)
Building Quizzes & Tutorials (EU optimized time; US optimized time)
Building Forms & Surveys – Asia-Pacific optimized time

Also check out our recorded sessions!

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LibStaffer

New Features

We did not release many new features in our last release as we were working hard to bring you the many new features that are included in this update, most notably the ability to select different languages for the text display in LibStaffer.

Multi-Language Selection

We’ve added the ability to change the language for all text displayed in LibStaffer. For this initial release, you can choose English, French or Spanish. If you’d like to partner with us to add another language, please let us know!

Schedules/Shifts

We’ve added a minimum number of hours per week setting for each user account, which will be taken into consideration when scheduling shifts.
You can now add a limit to disallow shift swaps within x time of the shift start time (anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours before). Head to Admin > Schedule Settings > Edit Settings > Shift Swapping / Shift Splits to enable this restriction.
You can also add a similar limit for giving up shifts, where staff cannot give up a shift within x hours of the shift start time. Head to Admin > Schedule Settings > Edit Settings > Give Up Shifts to enable this restriction.
We’ve enhanced the Admin Clock In / Clock Out process to allow ‘Clock Out’ dates to be entered for past dates beyond the day before the current date. Previously, it would only allow the current date or the day before to be selected. In addition, the ‘Clock Out’ date only allows dates to be selected based on the associated ‘Clock In’ record.

Workflows

We’ve added the ability to edit a note that was added to a workflow form submission. Head to Forms > Submissions Explorer and run the search to bring up a list of workflow form submissions. Click the ‘Review’ link for a submission, then edit any note you previously submitted.
We’ve added the ability to attach a file to a workflow form submission in the ‘Add note & update stage’ section. Head to Forms > Submissions Explorer and run the search to bring up a list of workflow form submissions. Click the ‘Review’ link and you will now see an ‘Upload File’ option in the ‘Add note & update stage’ section.
If a workflow stage change is set to trigger an email, it now includes the full name of the workflow form submitter.

LibCal Hours Integration

Have you ever wanted to link LibCal Hours to a schedule in LibStaffer? Well, now you can! Head to Admin > Schedule Settings . Edit Settings > LibCal Integration and select a Library or Department from your Hours list. Once selected & saved, you can overlay opening/closing hours for that location on your schedule.

Accessibility

We’ve added skip navigation links to the admin side of LibStaffer.
We’ve addressed a hover context issue on the assign shifts screen when using a screen reader.

Misc.

We’ve added access to the ‘Time Clock’ report for regular account users. Regular users will now see a ‘Reports’ option on their main menu when they log in. However, they will only be able to view their own time clock report and will be restricted as well to just the schedules they are assigned to. The ability to modify clock in/clock out times will not be available for regular users like it currently is for admin accounts.

Bug Fixes

SMS notifications for shift claim alerts for admins are now sending correctly. Head to Accounts > Edit Account > Email & SMS Alerts to use the ‘Give Up Shift claimed Admin alert’ option.
Edits made to individual shift names for a recurring shift series are now reflected in the email or SMS alert for the schedule assignment notification alert. Head to Accounts > Edit Account > Email & SMS Alerts to use the ‘Schedule Assignment notifications’ alert.
We’ve resolved an issue where the list of open shifts on the Home page was not displaying shift notes.
We’ve corrected an issue where using the ‘Clear/Delete Shifts‘ option while viewing a schedule was leaving orphaned shift records in some cases.
We’ve fixed an issue where Regular user accounts switching from the ‘Shift Timeline’ view to the regular schedule view was allowing shift times to be modified in some cases.
We’ve corrected an issue where the clock in/clock out feature was checking for a geolocation if a schedule location was set but no geofencing rules were in place for the schedule.
We’ve fixed an issue where the ‘IP Restriction’ table for Clock In/Clock Out was not rendering correctly when creating a new schedule.
We’ve resolved an issue where in some cases, users were allowed to ‘Clock In’ outside of the geofence parameters that were set up for a schedule.

Upcoming LibStaffer Training Sessions:

Planning Your LibStaffer Schedules Workshop

Also check out our recorded sessions!

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LibAnswers

With the 2.29.0 release we’re moving a step closer to wide release of Co-Op functionality! We’re focused on bringing you the ultimate in cooperative chat technology. Behind the scenes we’re hard at work on critical Co-Op functionality, including robust reporting, activity reports, fully integrated backup staffing FAQs, integrated feedback functionality, and so much more! In the meantime, we have these great new features, updates, and fixes as we get everything ready to bring you those big new features.

Chat Features:

Chat Widget Accessibility Update: Previously, keyboard-only users could sometimes have trouble scrolling up through their past chat history. Now folks can scroll through chat history using standard keyboard navigation. To see this in action head to any public chat widget – you can now tab focus to the chat conversation pane and scroll up/down with the keyboard.
Chat Department Members: We’ve moved the “Department Members” button from within the internal chat conversation over into the left-hand listing of all department chats, to better establish a connection between the chat department listing and its current status. To see this change, head to the new chat dashboard.
New “Greeting” Chat Message: We’ve added support for a new “Greeting” message: a message that automatically displays to patrons after the chat has been claimed, but before the librarian’s first reply. For Consortium and Co-Op users, you’ll also be able to set different greeting messages for chats claimed by a local LibAnswers librarian or a non-local librarian. Head to LibChat > Chat Widgets > During the Chat > Greeting Message to create one.
Chat Transcript Update: Previously when viewing chat transcripts in LibAnswers, each transcript was displayed in a modal window. We’ve updated this behavior so transcripts are now available via their own standalone page. This gives you more space to view the full transcript, and allows for direct-linking to a specific transcript using the standard page URL. To see this in action, head to LibChat > Transcripts > View Transcript.

Minor Features and Bug Fixes

Spam Filter Adjustment: We’ve tweaked the behavior of the LibAnswers spam filter for users submitting questions via the question form. Previously, if a submission from the question form looked to have a high likelihood of being spam, the question was rejected as spam immediately; the submitter got an onscreen notification and the question never entered the system. We’ve adjusted this behavior so that, even if a submission looks spammy, the question will still be submitted to the LibAnswers system, but will wind up on the “Spam” tab.
“Don’t Forget To Sign Off” message – We’ve fixed a bug with the sign out reminder message, which was not displaying in the new LibChat dashboard. Head to Admin > System Settings > Language Options > LibChat > ‘Don’t forget to sign out’ to customize this message.
Multiple Choice Form Questions and the Knowledge Base Explorer – We’ve fixed a bug where, if your LibAnswers question form used multiple choice questions in an unexpected order (e.g., using multiple choice questions 2 and 3, but question 1 wasn’t in use), in some cases the questions and responses weren’t being displayed in the Knowledge Base Explorer tab. Now, all of the questions and answers display, as one would expect.

Upcoming LibAnswers Training Sessions:

Planning Your LibAnswers Site Workshop

Also check out our recorded sessions!

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LibCRM

Organization Profile Import

You can now bulk import a list of organizations in your system! We also updated the Create New Organization > Name field to include auto-complete, to help prevent duplication of organization records. Now when you type in that field, it will display a dropdown showing possible organization names that already exist in the system.

Address Field Display Options

The Address field now allows you to select which parts of the field you want to show in the profile. Plus, you can set your Country and State Default values, making it that much faster to fill out the Address fields.

Other Updates

We changed the UI for all tables in the system both to allow room for more data and as part of a continuing effort to make tables customizable.

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LibInsight

E-Resources / COUNTER 5 Dataset Updates

COUNTER 5 data includes usage for items other than simply Journals, Books, and Databases, and now you can dive into these specifics with LibInsight. When you analyze your E-Resources / COUNTER 5 dataset, you’ll now see a tab called “Other.” This is where usage for items whose data type is not journal, book, database, or platform will appear. You’ll see Newspaper or Newsletter, Dissertation, Report, among … others. 🙂 Go to Analyze > Others > Usage to see title lists per platform.

Additional COUNTER 5 Dataset improvements

If a file you are trying to fetch via SUSHI is unprocessable due to excessive size, we’ll warn you to try to fetch a shorter date range.
When a SUSHI file is fetched but adds zero rows to the dataset:
- We’ll display the error in the Fetch List so that you don’t have to download the file to see what went wrong. If a SUSHI endpoint is not returning valid JSON, we’ll tell you that, too.
- You’ll can delete these files so that you can try again, if the service was unavailable.
We’ve added an internal note field to the SUSHI credentials form.
We’ll warn you if you’re fetching a report for which similar data exists. For example, if you have already added a Title report but ask to fetch a Platform report, you’ll see a warning.
We fixed an issue that prevented license and invoice data from being deleted when you deleted a platform.
We’ve updated the Dataset Wizard to include the E-Resources / COUNTER 5 dataset.
You’ll now see links to our training materials to help get you started when creating an E-Resources / COUNTER 5 dataset.
We fixed an issue with invoices that was showing titles from other platforms, in the Line Item section.
We improved how our SUSHI fetch works if the vendor on the other end queues their reports for performance optimization purposes.

Custom Dataset Improvements

We’ve added a display option to multi-select fields called “Account List.” Use this display option if you would like to create a field in a dataset that contains the names of everyone who holds an account in your system. Great for classes taught or questions answered by multiple people!
Widgets that require login now also have a logout link on them.
We fixed an issue that bypassed field name validation if your field names contain HTML.
We fixed an issue where the “Success” message was not legible in some browsers.
We fixed an issue that prevented the friendly URLs for Custom Dataset Widgets from beginning with the word “public.”

And a last few things…

We updated some language that appears on the Record Data screen for datasets where data is collected automatically.
We fixed an issue that was preventing the import of platforms with single quotes in their names, in COUNTER Release 4 and 5 datasets.
We restored the export buttons to the Analyze screens for E-Journals & Databases and eBooks datasets (COUNTER Release 4).

Upcoming LibInsight Training Sessions

Five x Five: Creating Dashboards in LibInsight (5 tips in 5 minutes each!)
Custom Datasets

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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 2019. We are always here for you if have any suggestions or questions.

Category: LibAnswers, LibAuth, LibCal, LibCRM, LibGuides, LibGuides CMS, LibInsight, LibStaffer, LibWizard, New Features |

Ginna Nicolas | September 25, 2019

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Using LibGuides, LibCal & Equipment Booking For Makerspaces

LibCal and Equipment Booking in makerspaces

Life Is What You Make Of It!

Makerspaces are gaining popularity in academic institutions and public libraries as they emphasize the importance of creativity, problem-solving, innovation, and most importantly — rolling up your sleeves to actually make something. Some didn’t quite fall for the idea right away, even asking, “What is the point of a makerspace?”

For some, it’s a great way to test out equipment to see which one you should purchase. Sometimes reviews aren’t enough. Others want to learn a new trade or skill to meet the technology demands of the workplace. In pedagogy, it is part of a movement to activate curiosity, engage learners and to challenge them to make the leap from theory to practice. For the crafty, this is a glorious age where the rest of society is catching up to what they already knew, which is that it feels good to make something.

As makerspaces pop up all over the country, we see the benefits. These makerspaces provide:

access to equipment and tools from sewing machines to 3D printers, laser cutters to film and sound equipment, etc.
instruction on how to use the equipment
mentorship, collaboration, and the sharing of knowledge between people of all skill levels

Springshare tools can help you publicize your makerspace, organize your workshops, orientations, and instruction sessions, and even make booking time on the equipment a snap — so you can focus on building excitement!

Step One: Create a LibGuide To Inform Your Patrons About The Makerspace.

The Science Library Makerspace at the University of Georgia has a LibGuide where they delve into the equipment via the tabs at the top. They’ve included excellent images, pertinent videos, and specifications of the different models they have available, plus detailed policy information.

Middle Tennessee State University has its makerspace information nestled in its Technology Services LibGuide. Here they spell out who is allowed to use the makerspace, they provide contact information, and specifics on charges. Plus, they actually define makerspace and provide a list of equipment as well as let patrons know what must be reserved.

Step Two: Use LibCal To Make Sure Patrons Get Trained.

Most academic libraries require the students, staff, and faculty to participate in workshops, orientations, or training before they can use the equipment in the makerspaces. LibCal is perfect for scheduling these instruction sessions.

Santa Cruz Public Library uses LibCal to spread the word on The Make Lab @ Scotts Valley. This branch hosts makerspace events where patrons are encouraged to bring crafts or projects, test out tools and/or come to learn and explore. LibCal makes it easy to set up recurring events, allows you to designate the audience and categories, and you can attach your related makerspace LibGuide. Once you make an event, it’s easy to create a template from the event for future use. To amplify your reach, you can share the events on social media right from inside LibCal. Patrons can click show more dates in case they’re interested but can’t make it to this one.

LibCal is flexible. You can set your events up to require registration where you may define a limit to the number of people you can accommodate. Or, like a Drop-In Makerspace at Sonoma County Library, it can be open to all who are interested.

Step Three: Add Equipment Booking to LibCal to Book Time on The Equipment.

You can add the Equipment Booking module to your LibCal system to tackle a specific use case like makerspaces. Clients use the Equipment Booking module for everything from loaning out museum and zoo passes to chargers, tablets, and laptops to things like projectors and smartboards, podiums and microphones. You can book a room in LibCal and then add equipment to that booking or book items independently. For makerspace use, it’s perfect!

Simply add the equipment you have available. The module lets you add a description and the specs, plus important details like the serial number and warranty information, service history, the cost to replace it, and more. Set up the availability for the video camera or 3D printer, etc. along with the duration and restrictions. Patrons will see a beautiful tile layout of your available equipment organized by category. They can book time on the equipment as you allowed.

Houston Public Library uses Equipment Booking for their Tech Link. They have an embroidery machine listed, which includes a photo, suggested applications, and the days and time slots it can be booked.

With Springshare tools, it’s easy to educate your patrons about what to expect from your makerspace. It’s even easier to schedule safety and orientation workshops and to let patrons book that screenprinting kit they’ve been eyeing! A makerspace encourages risk-taking, cultivates perseverance, inspires deeper dives. These spaces create communities and foster apprenticeship. We’re thrilled to be part of this movement that supports the highly-engaged, innovative, let’s make something enthusiasts.

Category: General, LibCal, LibGuides |

Talia | September 19, 2019

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Limited Series: Hear Librarians Discuss How They Use LibWizard

LibWizard Guest Speaker Series. Register Now!

One of the best ways to learn how to use a tool, or to see if a tool is right for you, is to see how others are using it. To that end, we’ve asked some amazing librarians to showcase how they’re using LibWizard in their institutions. This October limited webinar series has some amazing presentations that you won’t want to miss!

For those of you who don’t know, LibWizard is our form, survey, quiz, and interactive tutorial building tool. There’s no limit to the number of items you create or the number of responses you gather. It integrates natively with LibGuides, has embeddable widgets, and robust statistics and reporting. Plus, we just released a bunch of new features (including authentication integration!) and the ability to create pre-filled surveys/forms.

LibWizard is such a versatile tool. It can be used for servicing distance learners, creating student-centered tutorials, surveying a captive audience, promoting collections and tracking success, and even sending an SOS message out to get backup help when your virtual chat reference service is exploding… and so much more.

But teaching and communicating doesn’t always mean the librarian to patron dynamic. Teaching often occurs between coworkers, across departments, or even teaching new hires, pages, or student workers. And LibWizard can help you there too.

To that end, no matter what type of library you’re in – you’ll want to check-out the below guest presenters and see how they’re using LibWizard to communicate to patrons, and with each other.

If you need a LibWizard refresher and you’re in UTC +1 – +6 time zones, please join us for a LibWizard webinar on Creating Scalable, Self-Paced Learning for Distance Learners. Wed, October 2nd. 5:00am – 5:30am U.S. ET (UTC -4) / 10.00 WEST (UTC +1) / 11.00 CEST (UTC +2) / 12.00 EEST (UTC +3).

Guest Presenter Line-Up

All times listed below are in U.S. Eastern Time.

Training Student Workers Using LibWizard

Tuesday, October 8. 2:00pm – 2:30pm.

Sue Hunter, University of Guelph-Humber

If you’re a public, K12, or special library… don’t be dissuaded by the use of ‘student workers’ in the title. Simply replace the term ‘student worker’ with pages, employees, staff, volunteers, or parents. The concept applies to all library types!

The Wizarding World of LibWizard and Assessment

Friday, October 11. 2:00pm – 2:30pm.

Marianne Giltrud, Prince Georges Community College

Marianne will cover how they’re using LibWizard for student assessment. Public libraries, if you do any type of patron learning assessment… don’t miss out on this session.

Training Staff with LibWizard

Wednesday, October 16. 2:00pm – 2:30pm.

Melissa Jones, Wilmington University.

Staff training can take place when its most convenient for them, outside of meetings! Melissa will cover how they’re using LibWizard to keep staff up-to-date.

Category: Client Stories, Community, LibWizard |

Ginna Nicolas | September 11, 2019

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Share LibWizard Surveys With Some Fields…Pre-Filled For Ease

LibWizard. Yes! Send Surveys with Fields Already Pre-Filled

Getting Feedback Just Got A Whole Lot Easier!

Libraries mean it when they say they want patron feedback. The term gathering intelligence couldn’t be more appropriate than when considering feedback surveys. Expertly crafted instruction sessions are just the beginning of this essential relationship being built between the librarians and their patrons. How did they find out about the session? Did it deliver what was promised or marketed? What did it not cover that it should have? Would that participant recommend the session to a friend? Asking the right questions for your library is a critical piece of the puzzle. Post-instruction surveys are an invaluable source for anyone committed to customer service.

The full LibWizard system not only makes it easy to create unlimited surveys, forms, quizzes, and tutorials. Along with the many amazing new LibWizard features now, you can even elect to pre-fill some of the fields to further support ease of use.

Using The LibWizard Pre-Fill Feature in Your Surveys.

You can create surveys for website feedback, pre- and post-instruction, to gather feedback for events at your library, to learn more about what your patrons want to see more or less of in terms of services, etc. Chances are if you want to know what your users think, a survey will do the job. In many cases, it would be beneficial to both your team and the patrons themselves if some of the fields were pre-filled. It saves time. It assures a level of accuracy that might otherwise skew results or cause confusion. It allows your users to focus on the questions that serve the core purpose of the survey.

Here are some examples of fields that you might pre-fill. If you plan to send your survey to a specific subset of people, you can make things a bit easier by pre-filling, for instance, the course section.

You can pre-fill the name of the instructor, the semester, the type of event, location, etc. Some patrons hesitate to fill out surveys because they fear it will be time consuming.

In the interest of efficiency and to get as many participants as possible, make this pre-fill step part of your process. You need this information, but it can be handled nicely by this LibWizard feature.

Avoid survey fatigue! Only ask what you need to ask and pre-fill what you can.

How To Enable & Get Started With The LibWizard Pre-Fill Feature.

Our LibWizard FAQ states that,

You can pre-fill a survey’s fields by passing values in a URL, using either a custom URL string that you create, or an OpenURL link. When a user clicks on one of these links, they’ll be taken to your survey with the fields already filled out using the values passed from your URL.

The Custom URL option is just that. Values are contained inside parameters which are added to the end of the survey’s custom URL. Send that URL to your participants and the fields are pre-filled per your selections.

The OpenURL option lets you map survey fields to specific OpenURL parameters, subsequently passing citation information to your survey from, perhaps, your link resolver or catalog.

Our example here uses the Custom URL option. To get started, go to Survey Options > Advanced >Pre-Filled Survey via URL > Configure URL Settings.

Once inside the configuration screen, simply Enable the Pre-Filled Survey via URL option. Now you will see your survey questions and can proceed with deciding for which questions you want to go ahead and pre-select the answers. Make your choices. Click Generate custom URL string and voila! You can now send this URL to the ENG 101 class taught by Chester Copperpot with those fields already filled.

To learn more about the Custom URL option, like how to swap the Field IDs used as the default identifier in the URL for the field short names, which can make it easier to know what’s in the URL string, or to look into the OpenURL option, which can be favorable for interlibrary loan request forms, for instance — make sure to read the LibWizard FAQ dedicated to this Pre-filled Fields feature.

You want patron feedback. It’s crucial to improving all your library’s efforts. Create surveys that are relevant to the patrons. Make them painless. And perhaps, more importantly, share with them the reasons their input is vital.

Category: LibWizard, New Features, Tips and Tricks |

Ginna Nicolas | August 28, 2019

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Springshare Tools: Excellent Examples You’ve Got To See!

On the lookout for Springshare Examples You will love

Librarians Are Doing Such Amazing Work — We Have To Share!

The level of energy is always pretty high here at Springshare. But, lately, we’ve been seeing such exceptionally cool work being done with our solutions, that the excitement level definitely goes up even more. We absolutely love to see smart LibGuides, super helpful LibAnswers FAQs, stunning and useful LibInsight dashboards and seamless integrations of LibCal. What do we love even more? Sharing these fine examples with you!

So, get ready to be inspired. And, remember, enthusiasm is contagious. Don’t be afraid to try new ways to help your patrons. Have fun.

Be Open To All The Possibilities With LibGuides.

There are many LibGuides out there that aim to suggest books to patrons. Some are seasonal like Summer Reads, while others help you delve into extensive collections like Graphic Novels. You’ll find recommendations by genres like Detective Fiction, Crime and Mystery Novels, for instance.

One of the things people have always done is to ask librarians for recommendations, so these guides are a great way to proactively meet this need. Could the guides go on forever? Yes? Who doesn’t have more favorites that can be included? But inclusion — and what that truly means is a conversation we should be having.

Edith Campbell, a librarian at Indiana State University, built a LibGuide that has received a lot of positive attention since she shared it on social media and with good reason. The guide focuses on Inclusive Youth Literature. She begins by saying, “Diverse Books Matter” then shares the link to an article from the National Council of Teachers of English called, Students Have A Right And A Need To Read Diverse Books.

Her guide shares general resources for good sites for finding books that address inclusion, diversity, anti-racism and more. It’s organized with tabs for Educator Resources, Disabilities, IPOC – Indigenous People and People of Color, LGBTQIA, and more. This guide is an amazing resource and we couldn’t wait to share it.

Create The FAQs They Need — And Include Images!

Creating and publishing an FAQ from scratch is a great way to build up a healthy amount of LibAnswers FAQs. This makes your LibAnswers Platform incredibly useful as patrons can search it day or night with a greater chance of finding what they need. As you generate these FAQs consider what will be the most impactful way to answer the question. Being as illustrative as possible is always a plus.

Delaware County Community College is on the right track to serving its patrons with a very useful FAQ answered by Eleanor Goldberg that answers the question “Are my textbooks available in the library?” The content alone should make it a very popular FAQ. However, the number of hits is not the only thing that makes an FAQ a successful one.

They picked a great topic
They included the perfect screenshot
They added a callout to really zero in on the important part of the image
They included links within the answer for more information
They shared the FAQ on social media to proactively reach even more people.

Kudos to the attention DCCC pays to their FAQs. It’s a strong step in the direction of next-level service.

Dashing LibInsight Dashboards Stop People In Their Tracks.

Of all the powerful features in LibInsight, the ability to create dashboards is one of the showstoppers. We know that the next step for your data involves

The ability to hold everything you’ve got, past, present, and future
Multiple ways to analyze the data and look at correlations
Having an effective way to share your pertinent data with interested parties

Creating accessible dashboards is an invaluable way to communicate essential information. You can make them frozen snapshots of a particular time period like the 4th Quarter. Or, you can set them up so they auto-update showing the last 2 weeks, let’s say.

We had to share with you this terrific dashboard from Massasoit Libraries put together by Erin McCoy.

It is organized and designed to show, What’s Happening in Brockton – Previous 2 weeks. Titles like these are critical so that a person looking at it knows instantly what is being displayed.

Erin is able to convey Reference data like

User Help Totals by Day
Interactions by Time of Day
Question Type (Computer Assistance, Directional, Equipment, Homework Help, or Library Related)
Reference Questions (Citations, Database use/Finding Articles, etc.)

This dashboard with its charts and graphs is easily ingestible. You know exactly what is happening at the library at a glance.

The dashboard updates on its own because it’s been set to feature a rolling date range so you don’t have to keep rebuilding and rerunning stats.

Whether you want to make private or public dashboards, they are an attractive way to keep your audience involved and informed.

Seamless Integrations Keep Patrons Focused.

LibGuides and LibCal work so brilliantly together that it’s nice to see them integrated. For instance, if you’re having an author event that you put on your calendar with a sterling description and enable registration — it makes sense to build a guide on the author, too. You can include a nice photograph and add their books, and perhaps embed a video of an interview. You can easily add this related LibGuide to the event at creation. As your patrons have a look at the event listing, they will have the opportunity to check out your guide as well.

San Jose State University recognizes the value of a LibGuides + LibCal partnership. They have seamlessly integrated the Springshare solutions in their beautiful 3D Printing LibGuide. The home page of the guide delivers vital introductory information and spotlights the 3D printers with stunning photos of the machines. The second page titled Schedule Your Print allows you to do just that. You can book a time to use one of the 3 printers. It features an embedded LibCal Space Booking as an iframe that patrons can interact with right on the spot.

This thoughtful execution from SJSU is easy to achieve and goes a long way toward creating an outstanding patron experience. This is the goal, after all. These first-rate examples all show a dedication to the people you’re serving. That commitment is something that benefits us all.

Category: Community, LibAnswers, LibCal, LibGuides, LibInsight |

Talia | August 15, 2019

3 comments

Ideas for Re-engaging Patrons in LibAnswers

If you’ve been using LibAnswers for awhile, you might be looking for fun and new ways to reinvigorate and boost usage of your various LibAnswers services.It happens to all of us, we get into a groove and then coast along.

But, if you’re noticing your stats are staying consistently steady, or flatter than Wile E. Coyote after using a catapult (this pun brought to you by Springy Greg! 🙂 ), it might be time to consider implementing some of these tips to turn that plateaued bar chart into a steep spike!

Reimagining LibAnswers FAQs

In case you missed it, SpringyCamp – Springshare’s virtual user conference, occurred on July 31, 2019. Among the amazing lineup of presenters (all of which you can watch here), was a presentation by Mikki Smith from the Corning Museum of Glass on Reimagining LibAnswers FAQs.

Bit of Background

The Corning Museum of Glass has been using LibAnswers since 2014 and created most of their public FAQs from an old database of FAQs from a previous system. Many of the FAQs included attached .doc bibliographics.

Around 2016, they became a bit more selective about which questions should turn into public FAQs, but did not retroactively apply that criteria to existing FAQs.

In 2017, they began to add images to existing FAQs and to use FAQs to highlight exhibitions.

Then, in 2018, looking at data from Google Analytics, they decided to reimagine FAQs as a mobile-friendly experience. Why? Because they noticed that a large percentage of their visitors were from mobile-devices. Thankfully, LibAnswers comes mobile-first right out of the box. But with some small tweaks to their FAQ content, they were able to make their FAQs more user-friendly, more mobile-friendly, and saw their usage stats increase.

Corning Museum of Glass FAQ – On Desktop

Starting with 1,300 FAQs to revise, it was a big project to undertake. Here’s some of the tips from Mikki’s presentation on reimagining their FAQs as an up-to-date visually appealing set of questions:

Same FAQ – On Mobile

Visuals – The Corning Museum of Glass has gorgeous objects on display. They make full use of that by embedding images into their FAQs to enrich the user-experience.
Improving the Metadata – Improving the FAQ metadata (FAQ title, answer, keywords, topics) helps to improve the SEO and findability of their FAQs. From their Google Analytics data, they found that 80% of their FAQ-traffic came as the result of a Google Search. Meaning that most users weren’t starting at the Library website. They started at Google and then found one of the FAQs because of a Google search on their topic of interest.
Actively Linking to Content – The Library and Museum have a ton of content to share with users. Don’t reinvent that content in your FAQs. Link to it in your FAQs to improve SEO and reduce duplication of content and efforts. Mikki and the team try and have at least one link out to existing Library and Museum content on each FAQ so it’s more of an experience and an opportunity to explore.
Rich Digital Content – The Library & Museum have videos on their YouTube page. By embedding them in their FAQs, they’re actively promoting their digital content and improving the experience for the patron.
Establish a Workflow – Create a workflow to ensure FAQs are updated. Mikki’s team divided the FAQs so each librarian has a dedicated number to review each month.
Promote on Social – Proactively promote your FAQs on social media to improve findability and increase your digital outreach.
Highlight Exhibitions – Whether or not your library has exhibitions, you might do custom displays for books (i.e. Poetry Month) or a promotion of archives, or an event. Consider creating a LibGuide on that exhibition, event, or display and then embed FAQs right onto it. Corning Museum of Glass did this with their New Glass Now Exhibition LibGuide and then added a tab to their LibAnswers homepage to highlight those FAQs there too.

Highlighting Exhibition, Display, or Event FAQs right on your LibAnswers Homepage

Launching Proactive LibChat

If you’ve been offering virtual chat reference services for awhile now, your users might be accustomed to the service and your usage stats are steady, but not increasing.

If you’re looking for a way to increase usage stats of your LibChat reference service, without launching a whole new advertising campaign, consider implementing Proactive LibChat. Proactive LibChat simply turns your LibChat widget into a proactive one – popping out after a customizable period of time asking the user if they need help.

So, instead of waiting for them to ask for help, you can offer help first. Enabling Proactive LibChat is as easy clicking a check-box on your LibChat Widget Builder. We outline how to setup Proactive chat on this blog post.

Institutions that have enabled proactive LibChat saw varying increases in usage from 230% (CSU – Dominguez Hills) to 600% (University of San Diego’s Copley Library). While we can’t promise how your specific demographic will respond, recent research articles written by Michael Epstein from the University of San Diego’s Copley Library and another from Lydia Pyburn from The University of Texas at Arlington Library indicate that the answer is yes!

Upcoming Webinars – Guest Speakers

If you’d like to learn more about LibAnswers Proactive Chat, we have two upcoming guest speaker sessions from real libraries using Proactive LibChat. Sign-up below:

How Two California State University Libraries Used Proactive LibChat
- Tues, Aug 20: 12:30pm – 1:00pm US ET
How the College of the Mainland Library Uses LibAnswers Proactive LibChat
- Mon, Aug 26: 12:30pm – 1:00pm US ET

Optimized Session

If you’re in the European Union and you’d like to learn more about LibAnswers and proactive LibChat, we have an optimized time for you!

LibAnswers Proactive LibChat Helps You Reach More Users
- Tue, Aug 27: 5:00am US ET / 10.00 WEST / 11.00 CEST / 12.00 EEST

Category: Client Stories, Customer Service, LibAnswers, LibChat |

Talia | August 8, 2019

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Letters From SpringyCamp – Recordings Available!

‘Camp might be over, but the memories (like the smell of s’mores) live on!

In case you missed it, our annual SpringyCamp virtual conference took place on July 31, 2019. SpringyCamp is Springshare’s virtual user conference giving you, our Springy rawkstars, a platform to showcase all the amazing stuff you’re doing with Springshare tools.

Since its inception in 2012, SpringyCamp is our most fun – and dare we say – exciting events. In fact, we look forward to it all year long down at Springy HQ. Why? Because we get to watch you! We get to learn from…you. The change agents, the harbingers of innovation, the cutting-edge pioneers… you teach not only other Springy users, but you teach us as well. And at the end of every SpringyCamp, all you hear down at our virtual water-cooler is – “well that was amazing!”, “did you see how they did that thing?”, “oh wow, I had no idea you could that with LibGuides!”. We’re as giddy as a kitten in front of a fresh scratching post.

If you didn’t get to experience SpringyCamp live, and you want to join us in the giddy-circle… well you’re in luck! All SpringyCamp recordings, along with presenter notes/slides are available. So if have 20minutes or a couple of hours – pull up your bag of marshmallows and get your sticks ready, cause you’re about to have a sm’roaring good-time!

One last thing, during ‘Camp, we asked guest speakers and SpringyCamp counselors to share the books and shows they’re binging on. So check-out the Books and Movies to Write Home About and if all this talk of s’mores has you craving some gooeyness, we have a S’mores recipe with your name on it!

SpringyCamp Presentations

Tessa Withorn, California State University Dominguez Hills Library

You Shall Pass: Designing Engaging, Student-Center LibWizard Tutorials

Learn how one librarian designed and pitched a course-integrated tutorial for a fully online undergraduate nursing course to introduce evidence-based practice. Tessa will discuss her process of integrating open education resources, animated videos, infographics, and hands on searching to engage students in a discipline-specific research process.

Ellen Filgo, Baylor University Library

Assessing Research Consultations: Surveying a ‘Captive’ Audience

When the Baylor University Research and Engagement Librarians moved off the reference desk in 2013, they ramped up their research consultation program, using LibCal’s appointment scheduler as a convenient way for students to book appointments with the librarians. In 2017, they came to the realization that there was an untapped opportunity for assessing their program, through LibCal’s automatic email system, which sends a follow-up email to each person making an appointment.

Evan Barber, University of Illinois Springfield Library

Oh, the Things You’ll Curate: Using LibGuides and LibWizard to Promote Collections and Track Success

Spreading the word about a new collection can be hard and tracking the success of social media posts and events can be even harder. This session will cover how to use LibGuides as a collection curation platform, leverage LibWizard to keep track of suggestions and checkout agreements, and using the reports built into those products to identify if events and social media posts are successful.

Catie Carlson & Luann Edwards, Tiffin University Library

Using LibCal to Create Consistent Instruction

With nearly half their student population online, it made sense to have a librarian dedicated to online services. They created a touchpoint for online students and a contact in online course development similar to the campus processes. This presentation will walk through how Catie Carlson and Luann Edwards leveraged LibCal to offer similar library learning opportunities and interactions to the entire whole university.

Mikki Smith, Corning Museum of Glass

From Answer to Experience: LibAnswers FAQs Transformed

In 2018, the Library’s Public Services Team formalized a plan to re-imagine the pool of several hundred static, redundant, and sometimes out-of-date published FAQs to function as a mobile-friendly, visually appealing introduction to Library and Museum resources. The project has so far raised the profile of the library within the organization and allowed them to strengthen collaborative relationships with other departments as they update the information they provide and the ways in which they provide it.

Bonnie Lafazan & Jessica Kiebler, Berkeley College Library

Using LibInsight to Reshape How We Assess our Marketing & Outreach Efforts

In order to measure the library’s positive impact on the college community, Berkeley College Library’s Outreach & Marketing Committee designed an assessment workflow using a LibInsight form, which allowed them to effectively assess and analyze programming ad outreach efforts, which are aligned to the institutional goals and the library’s operational goals.

Zoë Rath, Berklee College of Music Library

Moving Beyond Subject-Focused LibGuides

Zoë showcases the unique ways that they used LibGuides to promote library displays, library and campus events, faculty class guides, and even a conference. They partnered with the archives department and created a portal back-in-time to showcase historic black & white photographs celebrating Woodstock’s 50th anniversary using the LibGuides blog functionality.

Congratulations to our Survey Winners

This year, we gave away a free pair of ‘Camp socks and our limited edition Springy tote-bag to three lucky Campers… who completed the feedback survey!
Congratulations to Laura Dumuhosky, Jeanette Hatcher, and Jennifer Walz! Enjoy your ‘Camp socks!

Category: LibAnswers, LibCal, LibGuides, LibGuides CMS, LibInsight, LibWizard, SpringyCamp |

Cindi Blyberg | August 2, 2019

4 comments

Code Release: New LibCal, LibGuides, LibAuth, LibInsight, LibWizard, LibAnswers, and LibCRM features coming your way!

We’re not sure how this happened so quickly, but it’s already August! Many of our customers are in “back to school” mode, finishing up projects and getting everything ready for the new school year. That means here in Springy-land our support and training teams are sprinting to help all of you with everything you need to start the new school year right (and just start August on the right foot, if you’re not one of those getting ready for a new school year)! What better way to start August than with a bunch of new features? …maybe by having some ice cream while reading all about them? Mmmmmm….

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, August 9.

LibCal

We’ve been busy working to bring you the following LibCal features and fixes across every module in the system!

Billing

Record a payment note when cancelling/refunding an in-person payment. The payment note recorded when the cancellation is made will show in the payment details modal for an event registration or equipment/space reservation.
Override the cost of a booking on the admin side during the equipment/space booking process. Head to Equipment or Spaces from the main menu and make a booking in a billable equipment or space category to access the new cost override field.
‘Status’ and ‘Payments’ columns are now part of the Event Explorer CSV export if the event is billable. Go to Calendars > Event Explorer for a calendar that has a billable event. After searching in the Event Explorer, click the ‘Export Data’ button to see these two fields in the CSV output.

Appointments

Features

By popular request, we have started to add more granular user permissions to LibCal! There is now an account level permission to restrict Regular users to only be able to run the Appointments booking explorer for themselves and no other users. Head to Admin > Accounts > Edit Account > Permissions Tab to change this setting.
Also by popular demand, since we recently added cancellation information to the Spaces booking explorer, we’ve added it to the Appointments booking explorer as well! Head to Appointments > Booking Explorer to view who cancelled an appointment and the date and time of the cancellation.
The appointment cancellation process now allows additional notes to be sent in the email that the patron receives when an appointment is canceled on the back end of the system. Head to Appointments > My Appointments to cancel a booking and send additional notes in the ‘Admin Cancel Email to Patron’ template. (NOTE: The {{{ADDITIONAL_INFORMATION}}} token must be present in the ‘Admin Cancel Email to Patron’ template for this field to appear in the email.)
New email template: ‘Rescheduled Email to Patron’. Previously if an appointment was rescheduled, the system would send the confirmation email to the patron, without specific information that it was a rescheduled appointment. This new template improves communication with patrons by specifically stating the appointment is a rescheduled one. Head to Appointments > My Settings to configure this new email template.
When making an appointment booking on the admin side of the system where you are choosing a specific group, the categories dropdown now shows the categories in two distinct sections: ‘Supported Categories’ (the categories that apply to the selected group) and ‘Other Categories In The System’. Head to Appointments > My Appointments and make an appointment booking, selecting a group, to see this in action.
The ‘Directions’ field will no longer show on the public appointments confirmation booking page if no directions exist or pertain to availability set for an appointments user. Previously, the field descriptor would show but there was no information after it.

Fixes

We’ve corrected an issue with the Appointments email template previews where any HTML inside the template would display as code in the preview.
We’ve corrected an issue where the public Appointments booking page would show availability (although it could not actually be booked) on a day when there is none available for a group using the ‘Show Group Nickname’ option.

Events

Features

We’ve added a new system generated email to notify event owners when a patron cancels an event registration.
Events that require registrations have new options for when registrations close: 15, 30 and 45 minutes before the event. Head to a Calendar that has an event requiring registration (add a new one) to see these new options.
We’ve improved the end date selection field when creating an event to automatically default to the start date selected for a recurring event. Previously, the end date would default to the current date. Head to a Calendar and set up a recurring event in the future to see the new end date default selection.
After saving or publishing an event using the Publishing Workflow, you’ll now return right back to the Publishing Workflow page instead of the calendar.
When viewing Event registrations, the ‘View User History’ modal now has a column displaying the date of the event in addition to the registration date that previously displayed in this modal. Head to a Calendar, choose an event that requires registration, then click ‘Manage Event’. Click the ‘View User History’ icon for any of the event registration records to see this additional field.
Phone numbers and barcodes (if applicable) now display in the Event Explorer and its related data export. Go to Calendars > Event Explorer and search for an event where the registration form includes phone number and/or barcode. When clicking the ‘Show’ button on the event record that is returned, the phone number and barcode fields display. Click the ‘Export Data’ button to see these new fields in the CSV output.
The Event Explorer now has an option to include the event description when using the ‘Search’ field. Without this new option selected, the ‘Search’ field will only search for events based on the event title. Head to Calendars > Event Explorer to see and use this new option.
We’ve added missing language keys for the public events calendar for when multiple calendars are selected as well as the the filter options for the number of selected filters and the “Filter by Type” verbiage. Head to Admin > System Settings > Language Options > Custom Language > Events Pages to configure these new language keys.

Fixes

We’ve corrected an issue where editing the ‘registration close’ value for an event series would reset the start and end time of individual events that differed from the original event series start and end time.
We’ve fixed an issue with the full calendar widget where the ‘Audience’ list did not appear when selecting filters to hide. Head to Calendars > Widgets, then select the ‘Full Calendar’ widget where you will now be able to hide specific audience filters.
When a patron cancels an event registration, they will see the relevant event details on the public cancellation confirmation page for confirmation.
On the public event card view, locations with commas now properly display.
We’ve resolved an issue with cancelling event registrants from an event series where the patron was not registered for all events in the series. Previously, when trying to cancel a registration in this scenario, an error would appear not allowing the registration record to be deleted.
If an event’s booking form has phone number included, the waitlist will now sort initially by registration date/time instead of the phone number column. Head to a Calendar and choose an event that has phone number included in its booking form and waitlist records exist to see the corrected default sort.
The Upcoming Events widget now properly processes the max number of events value.
We’ve fixed the calendar color options selected for the admin view of a calendar. Previously, the colors selected did not apply to the calendar. Had to a Calendar, click on the ‘Settings’ drop-down and select ‘Color Options’ to set the colors for the calendar.
We’ve corrected the ‘Today’ language token so it will correctly apply to the public event calendar view.

Equipment & Spaces

Features

Select an event template when creating an event from a space booking. Go to Spaces > Availability and click on a booked space in the grid. In the section that displays the booking details, click the ‘Create Event’ button. If any event templates are set up in your LibCal site, an option will appear to select a template or create an event from scratch.
You can now remove Hours templates that are no longer in use without affecting any of the stats reports. Head to Admin > Equipment & Spaces > Manage Hours Templates to remove any template from the list that is no longer in use.
We’ve enhanced the Confirmed Bookings calendar to include the ‘nickname’ for a booking (if one exists) on the initial view of the calendar. Head to Spaces > Confirmed Bookings to see the ‘nickname’ associated with a booking on the initial view of the calendar.
We’ve added support for booking lead times for K12 (a.k.a., school libraries) sites. Head to Admin > Equipment & Spaces, click on the Spaces link for your K12 location, click ‘Edit Category’ for any space category and then on the Booking Limits tab, where you will find the booking lead time setting.
We’ve added the Booking ID for both the Equipment and Spaces Booking Explorer exports. Go to either Equipment or Spaces, click on the Booking Explorer tab, run a search, and then click on the ‘Export’ button. The Booking ID will now be included in the CSV output.
We’ve added any notes that existed in the Room Bookings to display in the Spaces module for any bookings that were migrated over during the Room Bookings to Spaces migration process. Go to Spaces > Availability, find and click on a booking that was migrated from Room Bookings. When the details of the booking load, the notes (if applicable) from Room Bookings will now display.
We’ve improved the Equipment ‘Fines’ page by adding the show/hide columns, Excel, PDF, and CSV buttons to be used in conjunction with the datatable results returned from searching on this page.
We’ve added a language token for the verbiage that displays on the Equipment/Spaces public booking cancellation page. Head to Admin > System Settings > Language Options > Custom Language > Equipment & Spaces to customize:
- “Click on the ‘Cancel Booking’ button to cancel an individual booking”
- “Click on the ‘Cancel Booking’ button to cancel an individual booking or the ‘Cancel All Bookings’ button to cancel all.”
We’ve enhanced the public page equipment search to re-load all items on the page if a search is cleared.

Fixes

The availability grid for the Equipment module is now properly displaying longer padding windows associated with booked items.
We’ve corrected an issue where if the ending hours for an equipment item was set to 12am and later, the reservation would automatically put the end time to the next day’s opening hours.
We’ve corrected an issue where inactive spaces were adding to the ‘Time Available’ data when running stats for a space category. Go to Stats > Spaces and then run the report for a space category where there are inactive spaces. The ‘Time Available’ value will no longer include these spaces.
We’ve corrected an issue where, when pulling data through the API, an extra millisecond was being returned when a custom time was in use for a space or equipment item.
We’ve fixed an issue where, when creating a recurring booking, bookings that were not created because of a clash would still show up in the booking confirmation email.
We’ve corrected an issue when a space or equipment category was set up for both 2-step verification and mediation. The confirmation emails will now include the mediated booking dates and times.

Misc Fixes

We’ve fixed the Google Maps integration for Hours locations on the public pages. Head to Admin > Hours and modify the settings of a location or department to set the latitude & longitude or place id values. Next head to Admin > Look & Feel > Homepage Editor or Hours Page Editor to display the Google Maps integration on the public pages.
We’ve corrected accessibility errors when an ‘Error 404’ page is viewed.
We’ve corrected an issue when LibAuth rules are in use and are set to auto-populate the First Name field.
We’ve fixed the LibApps signature option for event and appointment email confirmations. Head to Admin > System Settings > Email Signatures to allow users to set their email signature using the signature set up in their LibApps profile.

Upcoming LibCal Training Sessions:

Also check out our recorded sessions!

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LibGuides & LibAuth

We have a small series of fixes for LibApps and LibGuides this month! We’ve been working to tune up the back end, but you’ll also notice these changes:

Accessibility

We made the contrast of the homepage sidebar buttons WCAG 2.0 AA compliant.
If you assign a custom language to a group, that language designation is correctly assigned to all guides contained in that group. Some of you reported that the language tag was getting flagged by your accessibility checkers.
We removed a duplicate ID from the system and group homepages. If you target #s-lg-index-cols to style guides lists on your group or system homepages, please see the table below for details on what to look for in your custom CSS. Protip: now you can customize the homepage guide lists separately if you’d like to!

To target this element on the system or group homepage	Use this ID in your custom CSS
All Guides list	#s-lg-index-list-guides
By Group list	#s-lg-index-list-groups
By Subject list	#s-lg-index-list-subjects
By Type list	#s-lg-index-list-types
By Owner list	#s-lg-index-list-owners
All lists	#s-lg-index-list > section > div

LibAuth

The LibAuth updates this month center around the SIP2 authentication protocol. We’re seeing a lot of use of this from you, and are pleased to bring you some additional related features.

We added a toggle that allows you to honor or ignore any blocks returned from your ILS. If you’d like to allow patrons who are blocked for too many checkouts/fines to book LibCal rooms, now you can!
We’ve extended group permissions to SIP2 configurations. If you would like to restrict LibGuides or LibCal resources to particular groups of patrons, now you can!
We’ve enabled LibApps login for SIP2 configurations. You can use this if you would like your staff to log into LibApps using their SIP2 credentials.

Additional LibGuides fixes and features

We’ve added the Export All button to the Guides Statistics reports so that you can download an entire report.
We’ve improved the password reset process to make it more secure. Now when you reset your password, an email is sent to the address you provide.
We fixed the Tags filter in the LibGuides community site.
We’ve changed the classes used when you create a table in a blog post, so that they look the same as tables that you create in other LibGuides content. When adding or editing a table, simply use the Class dropdown (on the Table Properties screen) to choose the Bootstrap Table class(es) you’d like to use. The default is to have a table with borders.
We fixed a couple of issues with search results that were causing Subject names to appear more than once, and for the page results in Bento search results to have the wrong links.
We fixed an issue with LTI widgets that was causing links to open in the same window even if a new window was specified by your LMS.

Upcoming LibGuides Training Sessions:

Also check out our recorded sessions!

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LibInsight

We have been busily recoding the back end of LibInsight to improve performance and modernize the code. We’ve also got this list of smaller improvements to bring you:

COUNTER-related updates

We removed the link to the now-defunct COUNTER Release 4 validator.
We made several improvements to scheduled SUSHI fetches. Specifically, we delete a schedule when a provider, dataset, or platform using the schedule is deleted. We also added some validation for the “Recurring Until” dates.
When you copy a platform from one dataset to another, you’ll now copy any invoices and licenses that you’ve added to the platform. This includes invoice line item details, and file attachments, as well as license file attachments.
We added some error information to the emails you get when a SUSHI fetch fails. This will help us in troubleshooting.
We have added the &platform parameter when retrieving SUSHI files. Some vendors require this to differentiate among the platforms that they provide.

Additional fixes and features

We improved the interface for choosing more than one value when adding a filter in custom dataset analysis.
We changed the Last Login field on the accounts screen so that it uses the timezone set in System Settings. It’s pretty awesome that people were logging in from the future, but we decided to go for accuracy instead. 😉

Upcoming LibInsight Training Sessions:

Check out our recorded sessions!

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LibWizard

Abracadabra: magical new features such as the LibAuth integration and the Certificate of Completion are coming! (Thank you for your patience with those two features!)

LibAuth Integration

If you subscribe to the full version of LibWizard (i.e., you can create Forms, Surveys, Quizzes, and Tutorials in your system), you can put any form, survey, quiz, or tutorial behind a login, allowing only users at your institution to access it. Once a patron is successfully authenticated, their name and email address can also be automatically populated in to fields in your form (etc.).

To use this new feature, first make sure you have a LibAuth configuration for your institution’s authentication system set up in LibApps. (LibAuth Documentation) Once that’s set, go to LibWizard > Admin > System Settings > Advanced > Enable LibAuth Integration. Click the word Disabled to change it to Enabled, then select the configuration(s) you want to use. Click Save. Now you’re ready to use it on forms, surveys, quizzes, and/or tutorials!

While editing an item, go to [Item] Options > Basic Info > Enable LibAuth Authentication and choose the authentication config you want to use from the dropdown. If you’d like to map users’ name and email to fields in the form (etc.), select the fields to map them to in the “Map user info to fields” section just below the LibAuth option.

This is just the beginning! LibAuth integration opens up a floodgate of potential new and exciting features, like only allowing a user to take a quiz once or allowing users to save a tutorial and continue where they left off at a later time. Make sure you sign up for blog notifications (top right side of this page) so you’re one of the first to know about new integrations!

Don’t subscribe to the full version yet, but interested in finding out more? Check out our guide on the differences between LibWizard and LibWizard Lite, then contact our amazing Sales team for a trial / pricing information!

Certificate of Completion for Quizzes and Tutorials

Create a Certificate of Completion that users can save, print, or email after they have completed a quiz or tutorial. Customize the certificate through the use of tokens, which automatically fill in the appropriate data for that item. Available tokens include the name of the quiz/tutorial, the library name, date, and grade.

To enable Certificates of Completion, edit the quiz/tutorial’s “Thank You” screen and go to the “Certificate of Completion” tab to enable and customize it.

Other New Features

Randomize Quiz and Tutorial Questions
Make quizzes and tutorials more robust and deter copying by randomizing question order.
Re-Ordering choices and options
Need to change the order of choices in dropdown or checkbox fields? No problem! Just drag options around in whatever order you choose.
Allow multiple answers in Grid questions
Make the grid option behave like checkboxes: allow multiple answers per row!
Progress bar for Forms, Surveys, and Quizzes
You can now enable the progress bar so users can track how far along they are, just like you can in Tutorials.
New button/modal widget
Want to add your Form, Survey, or Quiz to a webpage, but don’t want to embed it right in the page because it takes up too much space? No problem! Use this new widget to add a button to your page, which pops up a modal window when clicked.
Field Rules in Tutorials
Show/Hide any fields in your tutorials based on patrons’ response. Want to show hints when patrons are struggling? You can! Hide tutorial topics that patrons already know about? Check. The possibilities are endless….

Fixes

Reports:
- Usability improvements such as freezing the top row (field name) so it stays visible when working with long reports.
- Keyword Filtering submissions was reworked to more easily filter through a lot of data.
- Performance improvements for forms that have a lot of submissions.
- The Date field now displays in the same format you selected for that field.
- You can now filter by date and/or submission’ metadata (e.g. IP and referrer) in addition to the usual filters.
Concurrent editing check: if you click save for an item that was edited by someone else after you initially opened it, you’ll get an error message instead of overwriting their change.
Want to right click a link for a form or report and open it in a new window? Go for it – now you can.
Various accessibility fixes.

Upcoming LibWizard Training Sessions:

Check out our recorded sessions!

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LibStaffer

This release we have a couple of fixes and some exciting info to share. First, the fixes!

We’ve corrected an issue where manually typing in dates into the date search on the Dashboard for ‘My Upcoming Shifts’ and ‘Open Shifts’ would not return any results.
We’ve corrected an issue with Autoscheduler and scheduling a maximum of 2 shifts per day with non back-to-back shifts.

Now the excitement! Although we will not be releasing any major features or functionality for LibStaffer in this release, we’ve been working meticulously behind the scenes to bring you an awesome new feature that involves a lot of back end work. Multi-language selection is coming! The feature converts all of the system generated text in LibStaffer (including the public calendar view and public calendar widget) to the language selected. We will initially support a select few languages, then take requests for additional languages for inclusion in future releases. Your help with creating the translations is always welcome and appreciated!

Upcoming LibStaffer Training Sessions:

Check out our recorded sessions!

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LibAnswers

We’re continuing to chug away at Co-Op related functionality, but have several fixes to share in the meantime:

Admin-level users can no longer delete their own accounts – this prevents the situation where an admin is cleaning up site records and inadvertently deletes their own account, which effectively locks you out of the site (oops!). To see this in action head to Admin > Accounts and note how you can’t delete yourself. 🙂
In an effort to make it easier to locate the LibAnswers queue question form, we’ve added links on various admin settings pages (including the overall Admin list of queues) to help you locate where the public question form lives. To see this in action, admins can head to Admin > Queues.
Previously in Reference Analytics, if you filtered a list of transactions by a search term in the internal note field, and then exported those results, the resulting export was returning all results. We’ve updated this so that now the export will return just the filtered results.
When logging into LibChat, the Settings tab is now the default tab you see (vs. the Chat tab). This change relates to upcoming Co-Op related functionality. Review / select what you want to monitor and head on over to the Chat tab!
We fixed an issue in the chat widget builder – the {{ domain }} template tag will now work properly in widget builder view. It’s always worked correctly in the live widget itself, this issue only impacted viewing the widget in the widget builder.
We’ve fixed an issue where, in some cases, if you had LibChat running on one computer and then signed yourself out and then in again from another computer, you could show as “offline” to internal departments. This has now been fixed, so online/offline toggles should now work as expected.

Upcoming LibAnswers Training Sessions:

We have a bunch of LibAnswers sessions for you this month, including sessions at some different times than our usual! See our whole calendar for the month of August for dates and times. Sessions include:

Planning Your LibAnswers Site Workshop
Setting Up Queues & Answering Tickets
Personal Chat Settings & Views
LibChat Setup & Answering Chats
Best Practices for FAQs
Customizing Your LibChat Widgets
…and more!

Also check out our recorded sessions!

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LibCRM

While the list of new features and fixes may be short for this LibCRM release, a lot has happened on the back end to improve the structure of the system. The back end updates mainly relate to overhauling the back end API (not visible to customers), which will help us improve and create fantastic new features and functions in the future.

Projects

No more do you have to create projects from scratch. Instead use the powerful new Project Templates option, which allows you to create and copy templates! Head to Projects > New Project > and check the “Is This a Template?” checkbox to create a new template. Once the template is created, you can then head to Projects > Template Projects to see the full list and edit or delete them. Click the name of the template to add related tasks. When this template is used to create a new project, all of those tasks are copied into the new project – a huge time saver!

Other Updates & Improvements

Data Imports now better handle errors and duplicate records.
Reports: In this release we focused on Custom Fields Filters in Projects. We made improvements to the date type field and fixed where the system was not removing selected conditions and/or values when a new search is performed.

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Category: General, LibAnswers, LibCal, LibCRM, LibGuides, LibInsight, LibWizard |

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