Archive for Talia

| June 14, 2021
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Learning Lab Streaming Live on Facebook

We were not surprised at all when our upcoming Learning Lab, Ain’t No Party Like a LibGuides Party, reached full max registration in just a few days. We were not even surprised when the numbers of the waitlist started ticking up and up and up. I mean, it’s a LibGuides party – everyone wants to attend, right? 🙂

So the training team got together to try and solve this problem. How can we expand access to this webinar? People want to attend, but we do have a limit on the number of Zoom seats available. What to do, what to do?!?

Springy Laura came up with a great idea. What if we live-streamed the webinar on our Facebook page? This way, folks who really want to attend live… can! And so, we’ve made it possible.

If you want to attend Wednesday’s Learning Lab, Ain’t No Party Like a LibGuides Party, from 1:00pm – 2:20pm US EST, just navigate to our Facebook page! You’ll be able to watch live and ask questions in the comments area. We’ll have a Springy on deck watching the comments and feeding those back to the presenters.

Do I need to have a Facebook account and login to watch?

Nope! Our Facebook page is open and public, so you don’t need to have a Facebook account/login to watch the webinar. So just ignore the prompts asking you to sign-in or create an account. If you want to comment or ask a question, however, you will need to login or create a Facebook account to do so.

I don’t want to watch it on Facebook, is there another way?

If you want to watch the session LIVE, watching it on Facebook or if you managed to snag a coveted seat in our Zoom webinar room are the only ways. However, we will record the session and have it available for watching on our Buzz site by the end of the week.

We hope to see you there on Wednesday and if not, stay tuned for the recording. We’ll be recapping the session including a link to the recording on this blog.

Category: Client Stories, Community, Events, LibGuides, LibGuides CMS |
| May 24, 2021
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EDUCAUSE Webinar: Safely Return Students To Your Buildings

It might not come as a shock to you that your amazing efforts are being noticed by other departments on campus. We often hear from you with emails like, “Student Advising saw our LibCal Appointment Scheduler, and they want to use it for scheduling student one-on-ones.” Or, “Career Services saw our LibAnswers FAQ and LibChat, and they want a LibAnswers system for career advising”.

Librarians are innovators. Always on the forefront of trying some new service, software, or process to provide better and better customer service to their patrons. And even more so, librarians always want to help others achieve. As Malcolm Gladwell puts it in The Tipping Point, you all are Mavens.

Mavens are information specialists, or people we rely upon to connect us with new information. They accumulate knowledge and know how to share it with others. Gladwell cites Mark Alpert as a prototypical Maven who is “almost pathologically helpful” further adding, “he can’t help himself”. In this vein, Alpert himself concedes, “A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his own”.

Tipping Point, The Law of the Few

Which is why so many of you who bring other departments onboard with LibCal or LibAnswers – end up helping them setup their system. Your selflessness knows no bounds!

LibCal Seats Beyond the Library

To that end, last summer when we released LibCal Seats, we saw many of you signing up as a way to reopen your libraries safely while monitoring building occupancy and check-in/out features for track & trace. And your efforts did not go unnoticed. Not only did others see what you were doing, but saw it as a viable way to reopen entire campuses. University of Michigan uses LibCal seats for managing reservations for classrooms, computer labs, and even their dining halls.

University of Michigan Dining uses LibCal Seats to manage occupancy.

The Fashion Institute of Technology used LibCal Seats for the 2020/2021 academic year to safely reopen their campus in the middle of one of the hardest COVID-19 impacted cities in the world.

Fit called LibCal Seats their Book It system

Join Us For An EDUCAUSE Webinar Tomorrow

The New School launched LibCal Seats for labs across the entire campus, with only 3-weeks of prep time, before the start of the Fall semester. To that end, we’ve asked Kayla O’Daniel and Marcus Longmiur to share their experience launching a campus-wide reservation system, in such a short period of time, and what the future holds.

Hear from Kayla and Marcus for a free EDUCAUSE webinar tomorrow, May 25 from 1pm – 2:00pm ET.

Register Now

Mavens Can’t Help Themselves – Spread the Word

As Mavens, when you have a juicy bit of helpful information – you just can’t keep it to yourself. Your strong social motivations compel you to share, far and wide. If you think this webinar, or LibCal Seats, would be useful for other departments outside your Library or useful for campus or institution-wide deployment, spread the word! Share this handy help guide or forward this blog post along.

Category: Client Stories, Customer Service, Events, LibCal |
| May 12, 2021
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LibCal Seats: Reopening Entire Campuses, Safely

For many of you, you’ve been using LibCal Seats in your libraries for months now. It helped you reopen your buildings, with occupancy restrictions to control how many people were inside at any given time, and it helped you with track & trace protocols with detailed check-in/out functionality.

But what you might not know, is that LibCal Seats is being used beyond the library. Many campus IT departments saw what the library was doing, and said, hey that could work for us! So kudos to your innovation which helps inspire others! FIT uses LibCal Seats to safely reopen their campus labs and studios with a system called Book It. The University of Michigan uses LibCal Seats across their campuses, including for their dining hall – so students can even reserve a seat in the cafeteria. 

FIT’s Book It webpage with detailed instructions on how to use LibCal Seats to make on-campus reservations.

EDUCAUSE Webinar with The New School

To that end, we touched based with The New School who used LibCal Seats to reopen computer labs, equipment rental spaces, and maker centers. They launched LibCal Seats, campus-wide, in just three weeks. If you’d like to learn how they did it, join us for this free EDUCAUSE webinar, and learn how Kayla and Marcus implemented LibCal Seats campus-wide.

Register Now

Spread The Word!

Librarians are not only resourceful, but also inspiring. So many of your workarounds, implementations, and projects inspire others within your institution to do the same. You won’t believe how many emails we get from non-libraries saying things like, “We noticed our library on campus was using…. and we’d like to use it too!”

If you think LibCal Seats would be useful for other departments outside your Library or useful for campus or institution-wide deployment, spread the word! Share this handy help guide or forward this blog post along.

Category: Events, LibCal |
| May 5, 2021
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Springing Into Action – Librarian Reserve Corps

What another amazing Learning Lab! Last week, Sara Loree and Victoria Messana, volunteer librarians from the Librarian Reserve Corps, delivered an amazing presentation on how they used Springshare tools to put out a call for volunteers, organize those volunteers by location and speciality, and communicate important information with volunteers, researchers, and more. All to help stop the flood of misinformation that was taking place due to the pandemic.

If you missed the webinar, no worries – we’ve got you covered! We recorded the entire session and we have presenter slides for you to download.

Takeaways

  • Using LibWizard and LibCRM to put out a call for volunteers and then organizing those volunteers by speciality, location, etc… to create a really easily searchable database.
  • Creating a LibGuides CMS powered website and then having to revise it as time passed and scope became more defined.
  • Using LibGuides CMS Groups to create public-facing content and internal/private/restricted groups for volunteer intranet information.
  • Using LibAnswers ticketing queues to streamline questions and assigning team leads to specific queues.
  • Helpful tips and takeaways such as creating a style guide, organizational talking points, etc.

Watch Now!

Watch Springshare Learning Lab: Springing Into Action with Librarian Reserve Corp

Upcoming Learning Lab

We’re huge 30 Rock fans and we were immediately drawn to this amazing CR&L article, Ain’t No Party Like a LibGuides Party, Because a LibGuides Party Is Mandatory, because not only is the content amazing but they reference a Liz Lemon quote. I mean, we could not resist. So we contacted the authors and asked them to deliver a Learning Lab in June, and they agreed! So mark your calendars for our next learning lab with UNC Charlotte’s guest speakers Natalie Ornat, Beth Auten, and Reese Manceaux.

Hope to see you there!

Category: Client Stories, Community, LibAnswers, LibCRM, LibGuides CMS, LibWizard |
| April 30, 2021
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Unlock Your LibGuides’ Potential

A few months back, we announced an exciting partnership and integration with Lean Library. With the Lean Library browser plug-in, you can embed your LibGuides right at the point of need. Here’s how it works:

  1. Your patrons download the Lean Library Plugin for their Chrome, Firefox, and other compatible web browsers;
  2. Inside your Lean Library Admin Dashboard – you control which LibGuides display on specific websites;
  3. So, if your patron navigates to scholar.google.com > your Google Scholar Advanced Searching LibGuide pops-up!
  4. Patrons can read, dismiss, and continue on with their Google Scholar searching, with a better understanding on how to get full-text or peer-reviewed results. Talk about delivering library instruction right when they need it!
Google Scholar LibGuide displaying as a pop-up in Chrome via the Lean Library Browser plug-in

Increase your LibGuides Usage

Utah State University launched a pilot program with Lean Library to explore whether or not this integration would increase their LibGuides’ usage. And boy, did it.

They saw a 450% increase in views, in just one LibGuide, during their pilot study.

This is Just the Beginning

We started with LibGuides, but this is just the beginning. We plan on working with Lean Library to integrate LibChat into their browser plugin-in so patrons can not only receive instructional support at point-of-need… but with a simple click, they can get help from your staff right when they need it.

Explore the Lean Library Workflow for LibGuides – Live Webinars

Special guest speaker Jason Folkman from Utah State University will be doing two webinars in May to highlight their Lean Library/LibGuides integration! Lean Library’s Matt Hayes and Daniel Horvath will be on hand alongside Springy Talia to answer any of your technical questions.

Register Today:
(All times listed in US Eastern Time)

We hope to see you there!

Librarian Futures Survey – What Does the Future Hold?

take the survey nowLean Library is looking into the future of the librarian/patron relationship. How can librarians connect with their patrons outside the library? What are the challenges students, researchers and faculty face that librarians could help support? Over the next few months, they’ll be speaking to librarians and academics all over the world to answer these questions. And they want to hear from you!

Category: General |
| April 26, 2021
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Thanks for a Great ACRL Conference!

We had such a blast at this year’s ACRL virtual conference. And while we missed seeing all your faces, IRL, it was nice to chat with all… albeit virtually. Some of you swung by to ask questions, others watched our videos and downloaded our brochures. And to those of you that dropped in to leave a thank you note in our live chat, well you made our day.

Winners of the ACRL Giveaway

Probably our favorite part of the conference was picking the winners of our bookshop.org gift card giveaway. If you signed up for our mailing list, you were entered into a drawing to win a free $25 gift card – and we were giving five of them away. If you entered our drawing and were waiting to hear on the winners, we wanted to assure you that yes – we did pick the winners! We believe in true transparency here at Springshare, so we’d like to congratulate the following five winners of our bookshop.org giftcard giveaway! Each bookshop.org purchase supports a local bookstore – and they need our support now more than ever!

  • Kimberly Bailey, University of Pittsburgh
  • Nicole Eckroth, University of Mary
  • Cindy Strong, Seattle Pacific University
  • Judith Riney, Brescia University
  • Naomi Bishop, The University of Arizona

Congratulations winners and happy reading!

Sign-up to Receive Springshare Emails

If you’re like wait, what is the Springshare mailing list? Let us take a minute to clarify! The Springshare opt-in email allows you to receive monthly training enewsletter updates, SpringyNews newsletter, and promotional offers and new product announcements. You can sign-up for all three categories, or pick and choose what you’d like to receive and we promise you – we’ll only email you once a month/category. Don’t miss out on LibGuides tips & tricks in our SpringyNews newsletter, or upcoming training sessions that get filled-up quickly, or our announcements on new Springy tools and features.

Subscribe

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Category: Conference |
| April 20, 2021
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Meet the Librarians Saving Us from the Infodemic

Named Librarians of the Year by Library Journal, Elaine R. Hicks, Stacy Brody, and Sara Loree, founder and co-leads of the Librarian Reserve Corps, are helping researchers stem the tide of fake news during this global pandemic. The Librarian Reserve Corps was created in response to the World Health Organization’s need for timely and accurate COVID-19 research. Elaine, Stacy, and Sara quickly formed a group of volunteers to vet, index, and share literally tens of thousands of resources for the global medical community… all using Springshare tools.

… And We Get to Meet with Them!

Next week, join us for a webinar and meet LRC librarians Stacy Brody and Victoria Messana as they share how they’ve used LibGuides CMS, LibAnswers, LibWizard, and LibCRM to organize volunteers around the world as well as vet and share credible COVID-19 research with the global community.

Register Now

When: Thursday, April 29, 2021
Time: 1:00pm – 2:20pm (US Eastern Time)
Register before it fills up!

We hope to see you there next week, but if you can’t make it – this webinar will be recorded and made available on Springshare’s Learning Lab website.

Category: Community, Events, LibAnswers, LibCRM, LibGuides CMS, LibWizard |
| April 12, 2021
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We’re @ ACRL Virtual Annual Conference!

We’re going fully digital at this year’s virtual ACRL Annual Conference (April 13 – 16). We’ve got 3D holograms. Be able to chat with your fave Springy using a VR headset. We’ve even got cutting edge Smell-o-Vision technology where you’ll be able to smell Mazen’s famous baklava when you come by our virtual exhibit booth! Okay, okay – none of that is true. Except the first sentence, we ARE exhibiting at this year’s ACRL virtual conference! And, and this is a big and, we have some awesome giveaways including five $20 giftcards to bookshop.org!

Finding Our Virtual Booth

First things first, make sure you can find our booth! That’s where we’ll be hanging out all week. From the ACRL virtual conference portal, click Exhibitors in the left column and scroll down (or control/cmd + F) to find Springshare. Favorite our booth so we’ll appear in your followed items. Here’s a quick video on how to find, favorite, and explore our booth!

No sound / 1min video duration

I’m At Your Booth – Now What?

We have Offers & Giveaways!

We’re offering two giveaways if you visit our virtual exhibit booth.

  • Win a $20 Giftcard – If you opt-in to receive emails to our mailing list, enter a giveaway to win one of five $20 Bookshop.org giftcards. Bookshop.org is a great way to shop conveniently online for books and support your local bookstore in the process. We’ll announce the winners of our drawing next week.
  • Get a Discount – Who doesn’t love a bargain? If you visit our booth and fill out a form, get 10% off any Springshare tool over $499 if you buy by June 30, 2021!

Talk to a Springy!

We’ll be manning our booth during the below hours, feel free to use the Live Chat tool to ask a question. If you want a live demo, we can send along a Zoom url for a quick 5-min product overview webinar.

Booth Coverage Hours:
All times listed in US Eastern Time
  • Tue, April 13:
    • 12:45pm – 1:45pm
    • 2:00pm – 3:00pm
    • 3:15pm – 4:15pm
    • 4:30pm – 5:30pm
  • Wed, April 14 + Thu, April 15:
    • 11:00am – 12:00pm
    • 12:30pm – 1:45pm
    • 2:00pm – 3:00pm
    • 3:15pm – 4:15pm
    • 4:30pm – 5:30pm
  • Fri, April 16:
    • 11:00am – 12:00pm
    • 12:15pm – 1:15pm

Watch Videos, Download Brochures & More!

If you like browsing at your own leisure, we have uploaded brochures, videos, and links to various websites. Take a few minutes and explore our site!

Will we ‘see’ you there?

The pandemic has drastically changed how we can see people and we sorely miss our time at conferences where we got to meet many of you in-person, answer your questions, hear your suggestions (many of which made their way into our products!), and have a chit-chat. And while we still can’t do exactly that right now, we can do this! So we hope to see you this week at ACRL’s virtual annual conference!

Category: Conference |
| April 8, 2021
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Get One-on-One Help With Springshare Consulting

If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t do everything by ourselves… all the time. Not only is it a surefire way to burnout, but there is a high probability that things will get missed, overlooked, or steamrolled over. And that’s why Springshare is here to help. Last month we launched our new consulting services program to help you get the most out of your Springshare tools and bring your goals to fruition.

  • Really want a new LibGuides homepage redesign but you don’t have time to code up a new look & feel? We can help.
  • Doing a large scale rollout of LibCal across multiple libraries, spaces, and logistics and need help thinking about the bigger picture? We got you.
  • Do you need to get your LibAnswers system live ASAP and you don’t have time to learn about all the features and settings? We can set it up for you.
  • Do you have another plan, project, or goal and need our help? We’re here.

Bottomline, our consulting services are as robust as our tools – and our main goal is to help you succeed!

Consulting Packages – The Right Fit For Your Project

We’ll work with you to discuss your goals and ideas, explain how to configure and customize your system to meet those needs, and show you how to format data for the appropriate data imports we’ll do on your behalf. 

During the project, we’ll review any existing sites or data that you’ll be adding to your system and provide prioritized email follow-up support related to the project. We’ll finish the project with a training session (with Q&A) focused on either admin or staff users.


In addition to everything in the “Setup for Success” package, we’ll also customize your site’s look and feel area with a custom header, footer, and stylesheet to coordinate with other institutional sites.

For LibGuides, we’ll also develop a customized homepage template and up to 5 different guide templates that can be used to create great looking content in your site.


Need us to do all the heavy lifting? We can set up your system, flip all the switches, and customize the look and feel so that you have a turnkey solution.

Through a series of meetings, we’ll discuss your needs and determine the setup needed. Our experts will take care of setup, build, and design. We’ll finish the project with two training sessions, one for admins and the other for staff users.


Arrange for customized training sessions for your staff, aligned to your institution’s needs or goals. Choose from one of our standard sessions or a training session completely designed around your workflows.

Get your staff solidly trained on the basics or go beyond for best practices or advanced customization.


Do you need help with a specific project outside of our packages? Our Springy experts can help you achieve any business goals at your library, so let’s talk.

Depending on your needs and requirements, we can figure out the best way to help your project succeed. Drop us a line – our experts are here for you.


All of the above options are designed with the goal of utilizing expert Springys to help you improve online engagement, navigate your community’s shift to digital, and engage users in remote learning service models!

Learn More!

Learn more about Springshare’s consulting services and contact us at sales@springshare.com if you have any questions.

Category: General |
| March 29, 2021
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Creating a Regional Chat Cooperative – Learning Lab

Last week we had the pleasure of sitting down, albeit virtually, with three amazing librarians to talk about virtual chat reference and the importance of having support from a regional, and global, chat cooperative. Caitlin Kenney (Engagement and Education Services Coordinator at the Western New York Library Resources Council) and Cornell University Librarians Leah Dodd (Research Lead Librarian), and Virginia Cole (Archaeology, Classics, History, and Medieval Studies Librarian) joined us for a panel discussion to discuss the WNYLRC cooperative and Cornell University’s experience doing local, regional, and even global chat reference.

In case you missed it, you’re in luck! We recorded the session, along with presenter slides, so you can watch and download all from the Springshare Learning Lab website.

Takeaways

  • The benefits of creating chat fallback so patrons chatting with the library start locally but if their library isn’t available, it rolls up to the Western New York LRC regional cooperative -> and then lastly the global chat cooperative for 24/7 backup.
  • Using historical statistics to make sure chat staffing is optimized.
  • The importance of feedback for quality control and using chat transcripts for training purposes.
  • Using tags to tag transcripts with followed-up, reviewed, etc. to keep an accurate eye on chats for quality control.

Watch Now!

More Learning Labs Coming Up!

Our goal is to host a Springshare Learning Lab every single month! Our next Learning Lab:

  • Springing into Action – The Librarian Reserve Corps (LRC)
    Thursday, April 29, 1:00pm – 2:20pm
    The Librarian Reserve Corps (LRC) was founded in March 2020 to provide critical librarian time, skills, and resources to the growing need for quality information in response to the global pandemic. They quickly recognized the need to have a web presence to provide information to partners and volunteers and a central platform to manage projects. As librarians who used Springshare products in their home institutions, LRC’s Co-Directors thought to reach out to Springshare for support. Springshare responded quickly, donating access to a suite of products to support LRC’s response efforts. Throughout the past year, LRC has combined LibGuides, LibAnswers, and LibWizard to manage volunteers and launch new initiatives. Read more in our blog post.
Category: 24/7 Chat Cooperative, Client Stories, LibAnswers, LibChat |
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