We came back from ALA in D.C. full of ideas for new features for our products. We’ve already coded a bunch of new stuff for LibAnswers (the LibGuides/CampusGuides update is coming soon as well) and here are the new features we just rolled out:
- Importing of LibGuides accounts into LibAnswers. It’s true – it’s here and it is not even Christmas yet! Now our libraries who have both LibGuides/CampusGuides and LibAnswers can import their LibGuides user accounts into LibAnswers.
- Improved accessibility for public pages. We’ve taken a big step towards making the system 100% compliant in terms of accessibility on all public pages (properly organized and nested headers, alt tags on images, title tags on links, “skip to content” links for screen readers, improved form labeling, and more…)
- RSS feeds for new answers and answers by topic. This is a biggie – note the orange RSS icon on the homepage and on every topic page. You can take these RSS feeds and embed the questions/answers from the system anywhere (including LibGuides/CampusGuides, of course!)
- The notification emails (when patron submits a new question) now include the demographic information about the patron (if provided).
- Better email notifications when transferring/emailing a question to another librarian to answer.
- Custom email signatures and more email options for answering questions. When an individual librarian is answering a question and an email gets sent to the patron, they can include a custom email signature (defined in the Edit Profile screen). System admins can also decide whether outgoing emails have the “From” line of the individual librarian answering the question, or whether the email comes from the general system-wide account.
- SMS Questions/Answers: the ability to see the previous message exchanges with the same user.
- Reference Analytics module: improved Visual Data Analyzer filtering – you can now filter data and create graphs in the Visual Data Analyzer for individual librarians (filter data by user).
There you have it. The best web 2.0 reference tool just got a whole lot better. As always, we thank all our users who submitted the ideas and we look forward to hearing more of the good stuff which we will then turn into new features.
Enjoy and let us know if any questions pop up – support@springshare.com