Check out this giant present for your holiday celebrations!
Or if you’re not into December holidays, Happy 2018 from Springy to you! 🙂
There are a ton of new features for you to explore in LibGuides this month.
Log into LibApps patron accounts with LibAuth
If you head over to LibApps > Admin > Manage Patron accounts = and if you see accounts listed there, those users can now sign into Discussion Boards and Blog Comments using your local authentication layer (LDAP, CAS, AD, etc.). If you don’t see any accounts listed there, good news, you can batch import! This way, your users can actively participate and comment in your LibGuides system using their trusted and known local authentication layer and without having to remember yet another login. Here’s how to set it up:
- Go to LibApps > Admin > Manage Patron Accounts to create accounts via import, or to LibApps > Admin > Manage Patron Accounts > Settings to enable self-registration.
- Set up your LibAuth configuration.
- Be sure to set the “Allow logging into LibApps using this authentication?” option at the bottom of the screen to “Yes.”
LibAuth Setup Wizard
If your institution is a member of the InCommon Federation or UK Federation, you can now set up a LibAuth connection in just a few clicks. Just choose your institution name from the setup drop-down, and we’ll create a configuration for you, pasting in your metadata URL and filling in machine-readable attributes. If you’re not a member of either federation, or you wish to use a different protocol outside federation setup, no problem! Just choose to set up a configuration manually. We continue to support SAML / Shibboleth / ADFS, CAS, SIP2, LDAP, and a self-hosted script of your own creation.
Let’s Encrypt support
We are pleased to announce support for free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates. Similar to the certificates that we manage for Springy domains (e.g., libguides.com), these short-term certificates for your LibGuides domains will be installed and renewed by us at no cost or bother to you. Simply change your site’s domain to your desired custom domain, and we’ll do the rest!
Already have a custom domain? No problem! We’ll be requesting and installing Let’s Encrypt certificates for LibGuides custom domains in the coming weeks. If you prefer to upload your own SSL certificate, you can still do that, no problem! Sites that have already uploaded their own certificates will not be changed, although you are welcome to switch from your own certificate to Let’s Encrypt. Please contact support to get started: support@springshare.com.
Let’s Encrypt certificates are currently only available for LibGuides sites with custom domains but will be coming to LibAnswers and LibCal custom domain sites in the near future.
As always, we manage the SSL certificates for your LibWizard, LibStaffer, and LibInsight sites.
E-Reserves item search
Now you can provide a deeper search of your e-reserves content! Go into E-Reserves > Settings > Search and enable item search to see new tabbed search results on your E-Reserves pages that includes all E-Reserves items. Search results include courses like they always have, but item search retrieves documents that are not assigned to a course as well as those that are. Visibility dates and access rules (passwords) for courses and items are also enforced. The new enhanced display also shows you which Subjects courses are assigned to.
If you don’t want item level search, just head to E-Reserves > Settings > Search to disable the item level search.
E-Reserves page URLs are “savable”
Want to send a link to your e-reserves courses by Instructor? By Subject? Now you can! Any URL that you navigate to on your public e-reserves pages is now savable and shareable. Bonus: this extends to search results, too! You can create a search retrieving exactly the desired subset of courses and documents and forward that on to the appropriate audience. Pssst, we heard you! We’ll be making this change for the LibGuides system and group home pages in a release coming up in a few short weeks.
AZ fixes and features
There are two new filters on the A-Z Databases management page: Asset Owner and Last Updated date. Use these to search for a subset of databases maintained by a certain person, or to make sure that updates have been done timely.
Additional AZ Fixes and Features
- Login credential updates save correctly
- Column filters on AZ settings page work correctly
- Counts of popular databases are correct on the Analyze Holdings page
- Internal notes with quotation marks save correctly
Accessibility fixes
- Added missing labels on public blog pages
- Reference to non-existant imagemap removed
- ALT text for Books from the Catalog
…and Even More Small Fixes!
- Added a link back to domains page from certificate upload page
- Image manager: replacing an image with a new image works correctly
- Databases without a URL show properly as plain text in a guide
- Guide Blog page RSS feed works if your site is forced to HTTPS
- Accounts page: account type filter works correctly
- Search:
- EBSCO Discovery Service search results pagination works correctly
- Punctuation inEBSCO Discovery Service search results works correctly
- The default template for individual subject page is editable when E-Reserves module is enabled
- Link checker
- Exclusion list URLs with special characters filter correctly
- All proxied assets are skipped
- Blog widgets: new option to display post dates
- Blog widgets display correctly for posts with more than one subject
- Statistics: Content Summary visible when E-Reserves module is disabled
- Updating single database asset with the API works correctly
And last but not least: we disabled the “Create Guide” button after you click on it once, so that it’s no longer possible to accidentally create more than one guide. 🙂