Happy Spring everyone – our favorite season here at Springshare!
As you know, we are constantly striving to improve LibGuides based on the feedback we receive from our community members. In that regard, we are pleased to announce that we have upgraded LibGuides to support secure logins via HTTPS/SSL. From now on, when you login to LibGuides you will be auto-redirected to a secure channel before being prompted for your login and password. This will augment the security measures we already had in place within the LibGuides site and network.
We also are happy to share some exciting news we’ve been working on for a while – two cool new products from Springshare Labs:
CampusGuides is a new product based on the LibGuides platform, which will extend the content creation and collaboration capability to any group on campus – faculty, students, staff, etc. This will create many exciting opportunities for collaboration and creation of even more quality content in your systems. CampusGuides will include categorizations of guides into logical groups, css customization for individual guides, password protection for guides, etc. We plan to unveil a CampusGuides beta in early May, in order to solicit on user feedback, and then announce an official release over the summer.
LibAnswers is a new question-and-answer service built specifically for libraries. Using LibAnswers, librarians will be able to answer questions in a public forum and point visitors to library resources that are related to the question/topic at hand. Answers can contain document attachments and embedded videos as well as links to applicable resources within LibGuides. Visitors will be able to comment on and improve the answers, so there will be a strong social component to the system. By embedding LibAnswers widgets on other websites, blogs, courseware systems, etc. your users will be able to ask you questions from anywhere on the web, for a true “meet the user wherever they are” experience. Users will be able to submit questions into LibAnswers via Twitter, as well as from their iPhones or Facebook. In addition to being a very useful web 2.0 question-and-answer service, LibAnswers will also be a great content-discovery and outreach tool for libraries, to help you engage more people and promote library resources. LibAnswers will be tightly integrated with LibGuides, and as such it will help drive traffic to your LibGuides site (and vice versa). The Beta will be unveiled in early May, with the production system to follow in the summer.
We at Springshare look forward to working with you on LibGuides, CampusGuides and LibAnswers!