As some of you have surely noticed by now, we released some pretty significant updates to LibGuides, LibAnswers and CampusGuides over the last weekend. These updates represent several months of work from our talented tech team, along with dozens of suggestions from our LG / LA / CG user communities! As you will see, there is a lot to review, so lets get started!
LibGuides
- The LibGuides text editor now allows you to toggle between rich and plain text modes without first needing to save your work. We also added a “Save Changes” button so you can save your text without closing the editor, as well as a status area that lets you know when you have pending changes that need to be saved.
- You can now change the order of sub-pages manually, so there is no longer a need to add numeric prefixes to the sub-page names in order to control the page order. When reusing a page, you can also choose to make it a top-level page or a sub-page right from the Reuse Page screen.
- When creating a new link, book, or event you can now decide if that item will open in a new window or the same window on an item-by-item basis. Any item that does not have its own custom “target” will use the default specified on the System Settings page.
- We have added a new “User Profile” content box type that will allow you to embed a LibGuides user profile box in any column, at any position, within your guide.
- Enhanced User Profile pages give you the ability to add your office hours, as well as additional custom content by creating one rich text box and one links box. You may also disable your LibGuides profile page if you would prefer to not have it be visible to the public.
- We have also added a dedicated Facebook URL field to the profiles, so that you can easily link to your Facebook profile or library’s page within your profile.
- The new Collaborator feature allows you to co-create a guide with a person who does not have their own LibGuides account. A guide Collaborator has rights to create and edit content on just a single guide in the system, allowing them to assist you with the content creation without having access to other guides or the admin areas of the system.
- When reusing links, you are now able to customize the “description” and “more information” fields, so you can tailor the link information to each specific guide.
- With the new “Links to Guides” content box type you can create a box that allows you to browse by subject/librarian, view all published guides in the system, browse by most popular guides, most recent guides, etc.
- LibGuides pages now have a visibility setting, allowing you to remove entire pages from the public view with a single click.
- All cover art from Syndetics is now retrieved at the highest possible resolution, and scaled down accordingly, to ensure the highest quality for all cover art images.
- We updated our code so that Google Analytics will pick up link hits in Links & Lists and Simple Web Links boxes! All you need to do is add the Google Analytics tracking code in the Custom <HEAD> Code box on the System-wide Settings page. Your link hits will then show up in the “Content” report in the GA console.
- You can now search for content within a Private Guide, assuming you are already on that guide and use the “This Guide” option in the search drop-down menu. We also added a “view homepage” link to each of the results on the search results screen, so you can easily jump to any guide homepage right from the search results.
LibAnswers
- LibAnswers now supports SMS/Texting through our new SMS reference module! Best of all, this new module will be FREE for the first year, with rock bottom prices afterwards. It is really, really affordable (There is a 1-time start up cost, but other than that it’s totally free for the first year). No cellphone required!
- The LibAnswers Homepage is now much more customizable. You can control the page layout (1 or 2 columns), column width, and use new box types.
- Previously, when you marked a question as “private”, it was deleted from the system as soon as you answered it. Now, they are kept in the system separate from public answers. There is also a new system-wide option to set all questions as private by default.
- The Manage Topics screen has been redesigned to allow you to see the number of questions under each topic and edit the questions directly from that screen. When you create a new topic on the Answer screen, that question is automatically assigned to that new topic.
- You can now send an update email to the person who asked a question by simply clicking a check box when updating a question in LibAnswers.
- When you delete users, you must first reassign all of their answers. Until now, you had to contact us to do that…but now it’s built into the process!
- In the Unanswered/Answered/Private tabs, you will notice many filtering options for the list of questions. You can filter by status, by answerer, by date, topic, etc. to help you find the questions you are looking for.
- You can now transfer unanswered questions between LibAnswers systems, allowing for even more collaboration between libraries and branches.
- Admins are now able to customize the default text of the “Ask Us” box.
- When emailing a user in your system about an unanswered/unclaimed question, you can now assign it to that user. Admins can now unclaim any unanswered question in the system – no matter who’s claimed it.
- Topics can no longer be assigned to the same question/answer twice.
CampusGuides & CommunityGuides
- All the features mentioned in the LibGuides section above, plus…
- You can now feature guides on group homepages, just like on your general CampusGuides / CommunityGuides homepage.
- Group filtering has been added to the API – you can now create lists of guides assigned to groups that contain a certain term or groups with the exact name you enter.
- You can display all the guides from a specific group within the Links to Guides content box via a drop-down menu option.
- You can now choose to have your group inherit the HEAD / Header / Footer code from the System Settings page, as well as specify your own custom HEAD / Header / Footer code for each group.
If you would like further information about any of these features, or have some ideas you would like to see added to our applications, please let us know at support@springshare.com. Thanks!