It's the middle of February. You've made it through the exhausting (and joyous!) holiday season. We're almost at the end of the winter season (for those of us in the northern hemisphere), and Spring is almost within reach. But, understandably, you might be feeling a bit rundown, weary, dare we say unproductive? If you're nodding your head, then this blog post is for you! We're going to cover some very quick, 'Surface Level' tips & tricks to help you feel like you're getting stuff done - in only a few minutes. Let's get started.
1. Prefilled Fields with LibWizard
This tip is fast, easy, AND will save you time to boot. Let's say you have a Feedback Survey that you want to send out, but some of the fields you want to be prefilled depending on who you sent it to. For example, when you email Professor Smith's English class, you want 'English Class' to be prefilled in under the field "Class Subject." Or maybe, you're emailing that same Feedback Survey to different event attendees, one for Poetry Club and another for Author Reading, and you want the appropriate event preselected under 'Event Title"... you can do this with LibWizard using our custom URLs with prefilled fields.
And, for those Academic Librarians out there, you can even use our OpenURL parameters to pre-fill citation information! Detailed help instructions are available on our help site. This functionality is available with LibWizard forms, surveys, and quizzes.
But wait, there's more! Not only can you pre-fill fields for your forms, surveys, and quizzes, but you can also route notifications of those fields to specific users. For example,
- A quiz that several instructors use but they only want to get results from their own students.
- A survey that provides staff feedback and each staff member should only see their own feedback.
- A book purchase request form that gets routed to specific subject-selectors depending on the book suggestion.
This training tidbit, under 10 minutes, covers pre-filled fields and custom notifications to boot!
2. Add Dismissible Alert Boxes to LibGuides Homepage
Regardless of whether you're using the default or custom homepage style, you can add an alert box to your LibGuides homepage to alert your users of important updates like snow closures, hours changes, and more. Once your user has read the alert, they can close/dismiss it and they won't see it until they refresh the page. It takes a few minutes to learn, but once you create the basic alert box in your LibGuides storage guide, you can edit it and reuse it over and over again in just minutes!
Note: This tip does require some basic HTML/CSS skills and you must be an admin-level user within your LibGuides system.
3. Getting Feedback on your Quality of Reference Services
The idea of creating, sending, and analyzing feedback on the quality of your reference service sounds like a big project... that you're just not ready to tackle right now. But rest assured, the LibAnswers Quality of Service metric is as easy as 1,2,3 - just set it and forget it.
When you enable it on a queue-by-queue basis within LibAnswers, it will automate the sending of a feedback survey. Choose the frequency ratio, start/end date of your data collection, preview, and you're done. The Quality of Service dashboard analyzes all responses and provides actionable data, and pretty charts, for you to use. Learn how to set it up in this 5 minute SpringyU captioned recording.
As tempting as it is to add more, and more, and even MORE quick Surface Level tips - we restrained our inner librarians and kept the list short. But don't worry, if you're craving more, we'll be repeating this idea in more Surface Level tips & tricks blog posts in the future!