Archive for October 27, 2014

| October 27, 2014
4 comments

Spooky LibGuides CMS Halloween Customization!

Halloween is the maker holiday event of the year. You’re carving pumpkins and hanging fake cobwebs. Baking spider-themed cupcakes and putting the finishing touches on this year’s costume. While you’re in the decorating spirit, take a minute and give your LibGuides system a spooky makeover, too!

Scott Salzman, at the Furman University Library, had this exact idea and easily added some fun Halloween customizations to their LibGuides CMS system.

This is what Scott had to say, “Through the power of LibGuides CMS, we were able to add our Halloween theme to all guides across our site just by adding two lines to our Custom JS/CSS Code section. One line each for a stylesheet and a script.”

With LibGuides CMS and the power of Groups, you can maintain your site customizations easily. Add customizations site-wide, at the group-level, or at the individual guide-level.

Get in the ghoulish spirit and decorate your LibGuides system today. And as the Furman Library put it, “Don’t Touch the Spider”!

Furman Library's LibGuides CMS Halloween Decorations

Furman Library’s LibGuides CMS Halloween Decorations

Category: General |
| October 8, 2014
2 comments

Recent LibGuides 2 Updates

We were busy beavers at Springy HQ during the late summer and early fall!  Here are a few highlights from the features that have been added recently to LibGuides 2.  For a full list, log into your site and check out the Known Issues / Latest Code Release guide in the Help area.

New Widgets

LibGuides Subjects Widget

LibGuides Subjects Widget

  • Search boxes – create a box to search your LibGuides system or to search your A-Z list.
  • Users – create a list of accounts in your system. Each link goes to a profile page.
  • Tags – create a list or cloud of the tags in your system.
  • Groups (CMS only) – create a list of your groups. Fully Restricted groups are not included.

E-Reserves!

  • As in version 1, you can create courses and items in support of classwork at your institution.
  • New! Reuse items from course to course.
  • Go to Content > E-Reserves to get started, or contact Sales@springshare.com to inquire about adding this module.

Serials Solutions (by ProQuest) Database Import – Import and update your database assets automatically!

  1. Go to Admin > System Settings > Proxy & Library Systems and enter your Serials Solutions client ID.
  2. Go to Content > Assets > A-Z List > Import Databases to import new or update existing assets.
  3. The import is not a destructive process, but updating does overwrite the database titles, URLs, and descriptions in LibGuides. The information in your Serials Solutions Client Center should be considered the record-of-record.

Public Pages Templates – Want to experiment with the layout of your non-guide pages? With templates, you can create new layouts for your A-Z list, Subject pages, Profile pages, the Search results page, or your Homepage.  Move boxes around or add custom boxes as you see fit.

LibSurveys content type – Bring Surveys and Forms from LibSurveys into your LibGuides CMS system.

XML export – go to Tools > Data Export to retrieve an XML export of your LibGuides system.

You asked – we listened! A partial list of features requested by YOU and implemented over the last few weeks:

  • Gallery box images rotate automatically when viewing a guide (not when editing).
  • You can proxy your Google Scholar links–or not!
  • Rich Text items found in Search & Replace link to the guide in which they appear (coming soon: edit assets right from S&R!) 
  • Choose how you display database descriptions: below item, on hover, or not at all.

 

Category: LibGuides, LibGuides CMS, New Features |