LibGuides Overview

Attendee Guide

Prepared for: ASU LibGuides Workshops

Prepared by: Tammy Allgood and Jenna Amani

December 5, 2007

Table of Contents

LibGuides Overview 1

Table of Contents 2

Introduction 3

Examples of Guides from Other Institutions 3

Structure of ASU LibGuides 3

Account Access 4

Customizing Your Profile 4

Creating a New Guide 5

Naming Conventions 5

Page Description 5

Template 5

Tags 5

Editing Box Content 5

Copying and Pasting from Other Guides 5

Deleting Boxes 6

Adding New Boxes 6

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Post to LibGuides 7

Adding New Pages as Tab 7

Adding New Pages as Sub-tab 7

Deleting Pages 8

Guide Status 8

Editing Your Guide 8

Usage Statistics 9

In the upper-right-corner menu, click on Guide Options -> View Usage Statistics. 9

Blackboard Widget 9

Facebook 9

On Your Own - Chat Widget 9

Introduction

LibGuides is a hosted subscription service which enables libraries to create a branded community of librarian-created subject guides or portals for their users. These subject guides, or libguides can incorporate all types of content including RSS feeds, embedded videos and podcasts, del.icio.us tag clouds, uploaded documents, user polls, etc. These guides are very widget-friendly, meaning librarians can insert things like custom-made search engines. Libguides creators - librarians - get their own individual profiles which aggregate all of their guides and contact information, and they can even embed a live IM chat widget. These guides can also be shared through a Facebook application.

The ASU LibGuides can be found at http://libguides.asu.edu/ and will eventually replace the static subject and course guide listing pages at all campuses.

Examples of Guides from Other Institutions

You can browse through examples of LibGuides from other libraries. For this workshop, please look at the guides at Acadia University (http://libguides.acadiau.ca/index.php).

Structure of ASU LibGuides

Your Guides consist of pages, and each page is represented by a tab on your Guide. You add content by putting content boxes on a page. So the hierarchy goes something like this: Guide -> Pages -> Content Boxes -> Stuff you enter inside the box (could be text, links, podcasts, rss feeds, videos, polls, etc.). When you create a new Guide, you automatically get a Home page for it (represented by the "Home" tab). Then you add content to the home page, add more pages (by creating new tabs).

We have created a basic template to help you start your guide. This template can easily be modified. The basic structure reflected in the template is the recommended guide structure. A guide should only be created for a general subject. Specific subject and course guides should be added as tabs or sub-tabs to the general guide.

Users can search within all guides and can go directly to specific pages within each guide based on their search.

Account Access

The ASU LibGuides can be found at http://libguides.asu.edu/ . They can be created and edited from anywhere through a web browser. No additional software is required. Use the username and password Tammy and Jenna give you to sign in to your account.

Customizing Your Profile

Your profile is the information that visitors will see when they select "Librarian Profiles" link on the homepage. Whenever you create a new guide, your default profile will appear on this new guide. You will be able to customize the information in your profile on individual guides, but it is also recommended that you have your default profile customized as well. You can customize your profile that displays on your guides through the “Customize Your Profile” option:

1.  Go to http://libguides.asu.edu/

2.  Click on the “» Admin Sign In” link at the top right of the page

3.  Enter your username and password that were given to you in today’s workshop

4.  Select the “Customize Your Profile” option

Creating a New Guide

Naming Conventions

Please name your guide according to the naming convention General Subject Research Guide – Campus. For example, the name of a guide might be Music Subject Guide – Tempe campus. The reason we ask for a campus distinction is so that we can accommodate subject guides from all campuses.

Page Description

To add a page description to the top of the page, enter information in the “Short Description” box. This can be edited later on the page by clicking on the text.

Template

A basic default template has been created to make it easier for you to create a guide. This template can easily be modified to suit the needs of your subject area. The template is called ASU Template. When you Create a New Guide you will be able to select it.

Tags

You should tag your guides to reflect your content. The tags show up in a tag cloud on the ASU LibGuides home page. Each word must be separated by a space. LibGuides does not support multi-word tags, so you have to make sure that they are always one word, and connect them with underscore or similar character, for example West_campus.

Editing Box Content

On the home tab, we will be editing the How to Reach Me box.

  1. Click on the edit text link under the paragraph.
  2. A box will pop up over the screen and you’ll be able to make any changes to this text. Once you are done click on Save Changes.
  3. You’ll also notice that you can rename the box itself by clicking on the pencil next to the Box Title.

You may also wish to disable comments on this box. Every box has the option of allowing users to comment on it.

Copying and Pasting from Other Guides

  1. Open the guide you brought to recreate in another window or tab. We will be editing the article databases tab in our new LibGuide by copying and pasting directly from the old guide.
  2. Copy the section of your old guide where you refer to Article Databases.
  3. Open the LibGuides window. Make sure you are in the Article Databases Tab.
  4. Click on edit text in the Research Databases box.
  5. Paste your text in the box.
  6. LibGuides will maintain links that are copied.
  7. Click on save changes.

Deleting Boxes

Even though you are working from a template any box or tab can be deleted according to your personal preferences. On the Home tab we’ll delete the blog since we will be adding a blog later in this worksop.

  1. Click on the Home tab
  2. Find the Daily Art Blog.
  3. Click on the little X next to the title.
  4. Confirm that you want to delete the box

Adding New Boxes

You can add many types of boxes for different kinds of content. We will go through each of these content types.

FYI – the feed for the Library Channel news is currently https://librarynews.blog.asu.edu/feed/. If you are using another feed, be sure it is a link to the actual xml.

You can link to another box in the system or copy another box. This can be a box of yours or someone else’s box:

·  “Link to another box” show's a box of content from another guide but doesn't let you edit it

·  “Copy another box from the system” show's a box of content from another guide but gives you your own copy of it so you can make edits to it.

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Post to LibGuides

Post to Libguides. This is a really cool feature that you can add to your browser which will add content to your Guides from anywhere on the web. Once it is installed, whenever you are on a webpage you want to add to one of your Guides, click on “Post to LibGuides” button and a small popup window will open up enabling you to add that page to any of your guides. You will find this option on your admin page.

Adding New Pages as Tab

  1. Click on add/edit next to the page tabs
  2. Type in a title for the page (tab). You can use “Catalog Searching” for this workshop.
  3. Choose “Add as a top level”

Adding New Pages as Sub-tab

Pages, whether a new tab or a subpage, can be added by clicking on the add/edit link next to the tabs. For this example we will create a subpage for a course guide.

  1. Click on add/edit
  2. Type in a title for the page. This will show up in the top menu under the Course Resources tab.
  3. Chose Add under Course Resources
  4. Click Create this Page

Moving Tabs and Boxes

The default layout is three columns, if you only want two columns in your page, you can change it by clicking on “Page Options > Toggle Columns.” If you would like to reorder your boxes, select “Page Options > Reorder Boxes.”

To reorder tabs, click on the “add/edit link to the right of the tabs. Chose the “Reorder” tab and then drag and drop your content.

Deleting Pages

  1. Click on add/edit next to the page tabs
  2. Choose the “Delete a Page” tab
  3. Select the page (tab) you wish to delete. This will delete the tab along with the content that was on that page.

Guide Status

When you create a new guide, its default status is "Unpublished", i.e. invisible to others. When you add some content to it and wish to make it visible to others, change its status to "Published" by clicking on "Change Status" link next to the Guide Title.

Unpublished - default status when you create a new guide.

Published - your guide is available to everyone and displayed on the home page under "Most Recent".

Private - only people who know the URL of the guide know where to access it. The Guide will not appear in the list of Guides on the main page (but people can find it by following tags, if you associate tags with this Guide).

Editing Your Guide

Here are the steps to return to your guide to edit it:

1.  Go to http://libguides.asu.edu

2.  Click on the “Admin Sign In” link at the top right of the page

3.  Enter your email and the password you were given by Jenna and Tammy

4.  Select guide you wish to edit

Please take this time to edit and add content to your guide.

Usage Statistics

In the upper-right-corner menu, click on Guide Options -> View Usage Statistics.

Blackboard Widget

  1. From your “My admin” page, choose the “Widgets” tab.
  2. Create a widget containing the guides you wish to link to
  3. Copy the widget code
  4. In Blackboard, you must add content. One way to do this is by adding an item on a current page.
  5. Make sure the “html” format is selected below the content text box.
  6. Paste the widget code in the Blackboard text box.
  7. This will embed a fancy link to your LibGuide as well as a catalog search box within Blackboard.

Facebook

There are three applications in Facebook for libguides.

  1. Libguides,allows students to have a link directly to their chosen institution’s LibGuides home page directly in Facebook.
  2. Libguides Librarian allows librarians with LibGuides account to have their published guides appear on their Facebook page.
  3. Libguides Library allows the institution to link to Libguides from the Library's Facebook Page. Facebook now allows organizations to have a page (different from a personal profile). Once added to your library’s Facebook page, it will provide a link to your LibGuides, as well as invite users to add the LibGuides Facebook app to their profiles. As an added bonus, visitors to the Library’sFaceBook page will be able to search your library catalog.

On Your Own - Chat Widget

The chat interface that comes standard in LibGuides is Meebo. In order to use this we’ll each have to create a Meebo account, a web chat client which allows you to aggregate various chat clients (yahoo, MSN, aol, google).

  1. Open a new tab or window: http://wwwm.meebo.com/
  2. Sign up: username, password, email
  3. Use one of your current chat screen names and sign in
  4. Click on meebo me widgets
  5. Name your widget
  6. Copy code snippet to embed in LibGuides
  7. Open LibGuides
  8. Make sure you are in My Admin screen
  9. Click on Customize Your Profile
  10. Paste code snippet into chat widget
  11. Save default profile
  12. It is not a downloadable client, so you must be logged into the meebo website to receive chats.
  13. Patrons who chat with you will be meeboguest

You may wish to fill in your other chat client usernames in the Customize your Profile page in addition to Meebo. This will open up the chat client so that the patron can contact you through that client.

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