Slaven Zivkovic › Comments

We've liked both here. - Joe Boone

it will be a busy, busy, and even busier spring and summer - maʀtha

Cool! What are you switching to Serials Solutions from? - Jen

EBSCO LinkSource and A-Z. We had our subject guides via LibData. - maʀtha

We're psyched you're coming on board! (says the Springshare employee ;) And sweet that you're switching to Serials Solutions - now you can import your entire database list into LibGuides with the click of a few buttons. Happiness... :) When your site is set up, let me know whenever you have questions and/or if you'd like to set up a training session. - Anna Burke

Curious about importing database list - does it only work with Serials Solutions? - Jen

Thanks, Anna :) - maʀtha

Welcome to our LibGuides Community, we look forward to having you on board! (says another Springshare employeee ;) To answer Jen's question, we plan on working with other A-Z providers as well. Please drop us a line at support@springshare.com with your provider/requirements. - Slaven Zivkovic

There *is* an app for that...in the API Utility in LibGuides. ;) - Anna Burke

Hi Jason, just to reiterate what Anna said: go to My Admin -> Widgets & API tab, select API Utility page. You'll see "LibGuides Search Box" as one of the options there. - Slaven Zivkovic

The LibX folks are just awesome. - Jen

It's pronounced "Lybez." - Jason P

No, no, no, no - it's a very clipped Julie-Andrewsish "lib -ex" .... But I guess you guys are right ... Although maybe I can say it like that here, like I say "Paariss" instead of "Pa-reee"... - Kathryn is Blake in Hindi from iPhone

I've only ever heard it the way Fiona & Kathryn suggest. And lyb-guides sounds weird to me. - Royce's favorite Anna from iPod

I was kidding -- I definitely say Libb-Ex. - Jason P

Glad ours is not the only product causing Libb vs Lyb debate. If you want to do a presentation on LibGuides, we'll help you out too. We integrate well with Libb (or Lyb X) :) - Slaven Zivkovic

Interesting, Slaven -- what kind of integration for example? - Jason P

Hi Jason - check out our blog post about it - http://support.springshare.com/2008... - Slaven Zivkovic

One issue if you're not in the US is that because it's hosted on Springshare's servers, any time it refers to dynamic content from your own site, when the user requests a page the request goes to the US, which requests your dynamic content, which is sent back to the US, which sends the page back to your user - that's four trips across an ocean which can really slow down response times. But I still really like it; it makes it really easy to include stuff beyond boring old plain text. - Deborah Fitchett

Thanks for the answers on Libguides.. How do you guys check for broken links on Libguides? Is there an auto-link checker? - aarontay

for "not in the US", please read, "not in North America." Signed - Canada. - DJF

:-) Thanks for the correction, David. Aaron, yes there's an auto-link checker - iirc when you run it it doesn't check hand-coded links (eg in the middle of a box that's otherwise just text) but will check anything that you've added as a link in eg a link box. - Deborah Fitchett

Erratum: replace "when you run it" with "when it runs every two weeks" (just I don't think there's any way to get it sent to you as an email or RSS feed, so you have to log in to see the results). - Deborah Fitchett

Thanks Deborah and all. Will have to try demo next year and see then! Don't suppose you let staff,student edit your guides? I read you need campusguides for more granular control? So they can edit only specific guides? - aarontay from iPhone

Note to self, check if it is worth while to use google analytics in libguides to check clicks on outgoing links using this method http://doteduguru.com/id1496-... - aarontay

We haven't done it but you could allow non-librarians to edit - but I think only up to four total editors per libguide, including yourself. Authorisation is on a per-guide basis so I could give someone access to my Chemical Engineering guide but not to my Chemistry guide; but I wouldn't be able to restrict access to only parts of the ChemEng guide. - Deborah Fitchett

A couple of thoughts. It's very easy for librarians to search through libguides at their own or other schools. That's built right into the springshare site, and copying between libguides even from different institutions is a breeze. So quite a few click-throughs could be from librarians. On the other hand, at our school they're more flexible than our old system, so we're actually making... more... - lris

In addition to what Iris said, I'm also betting Dana's stats are clean, because Empire State is our distance "campus". - Jenica

Jenica, I guess I mean that if they are not on the library's usual web server and if the stats aren't pretty clear about where all those hits are coming from, the X% increase may not mean a whole lot. Could be search engine robots hitting a site with higher Google Page Rank than your library, could be the LibGuides staff or LibGuides robots cleaning up and managing and keeping track of stuff. It's hard to know what a hit is. Anyway, if librarians and users are happy with them, it doesn't much matter. - Steele Lawman

fyi: I collect stats via Google analytics, not LibGuides. And I should have clarified the stats are just raw page hits (hard to convey all that in 140 char!). - Dana Longley

Ah, interesting. Thanks for the further information. I was just thinking about this because we are supposedly getting 10x the downloads with our electronic reserves on Moodle as opposed to ERes. Which seems dubious. But I don't know. - Steele Lawman

Hello, Slaven Zivkovic, the creator of LibGuides here. I hope you don't mind me jumping in to clear up the confusion. I apologize in advance for the longish post. First, we go to great lengths to ensure that LibGuides statistics are as "clean" as possible in terms of not counting spiders, crawlers, etc. To that effect, even the hits from the librarian's while they are working on their... more... - Slaven Zivkovic

(continued post). 1) The content in LibGuides is usually better quality because before LibGuides only the most tech savvy librarians could include multimedia and more complex data inside research guides - LibGuides makes it easy for any librarian, regardless of their html skills, to create better quality guides. 2) The guides do look "pretty" in terms of look and feel compared to... more... - Slaven Zivkovic

Ha! That got very close to an advertisement at the end there, Zivkovic! But thanks for the information, and I'm glad you commented. - Steele Lawman

This kind of reply is why I tell everybody that the Springshare dudes are awesome. :) - Jason P

Slaven, I have more questions for you, but don't want to highjack the thread... - maʀtha

Hi Steve, darn - I should have had Jason post this for me, then ;) (thx for the kudos, JP). Martha, feel free to send me a note at slaven@springshare.com or support@springshare.com and we'll answer any questions. Thank you all. - Slaven Zivkovic

<smallworldmoment> Dana, I just grokked that you work at Empire State. One of my best friends teaches at Empire State </smallworldmoment> - maʀtha

Martha - can I ask who? - Dana Longley