“LibGuides: Working inside the box” presentation
My former GSU colleague Casey Long and I recently gave a presentation called "LibGuides: Working Inside the Box" at the Georgia COMO library conference.
We talked about best practices for design, content, and structuring LibGuides or other online research guides. We got a good reception and had lots of excellent questions and discussion as part of the session.
Casey had the great idea to make a LibGuide to accompany the presentation itself, with links, resources and references, and a copy of our slides. I'm pleased to say that Springshare is going to add it to their Best of LibGuides site.
LibGuides book: call for chapters
My friend Aaron Dobbs is co-editing an upcoming book about LibGuides from LITA and Neal-Schuman. If you're interested in submitting a chapter, take a look at their call for chapter authors and send co-editor Doug Cook your proposal!
I'd be all over this if I weren't knee-deep in extracurricular activities this spring. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product.
LibGuides presentation
Earlier this week I gave an online presentation about LibGuides for the GALILEO initiative here in Georgia. Once again they were good enough to archive it. It's partly how-to/demo and partly suggested best practices and examples.
Leave the password blank, just click Enter. Pop-up blockers may need to be disabled.
Creative Commons instructional materials at GSU
I just got the go-ahead to license our online instructional materials -- tutorials, future planned podcast, etc. -- with Creative Commons licenses to encourage other libraries to use and build on them.
I made the inquiry since I'm planning on starting another instructional podcast for students before spring semester is out (knock on wood) and I wanted to CC license that. I am so impressed: I asked my boss, who asked her boss, who had a thumbs-up from GSU's legal department within a few hours. At no point in the chain did anyone ask "Creative what?", which I take as a good sign for the Creative Commons project.
So this morning I went through all of my Libguides and added CC licenses. It was possibly the geekiest thing I've ever been excited about.
Libguides adds image uploading
In a stroke of excellent timing (as I'm beginning to put together training materials), Springshare has added a beta image upload feature to Libguides.
Users can upload images (in any web-recognizable format, i.e. gif, jpg, png) from their computer into the LibGuides boxes via the Rich Text Editor, and the images will be stored on LibGuides servers.
I really love using Libguides, but the lack of integrated image uploading has been the one inconvenient feature for most of the librarians I've worked with. At my previous library we had to find awkward workarounds like creating unpublished web pages containing their images since there wasn't easy ftp access to the web server for most people. This is going to be a welcome addition to an excellent product.
Free Audiobooks Guide
I've been meaning to post this for a while, but have obviously had a busy summer so far. I did eventually get around to creating that guide to free audiobooks that I have been meaning to do for a while:
Short version: students leaving for break always want audiobooks, we don't have many. I listen to a lot of audio fiction, hence the idea. If you have suggestions for additions, please post 'em.
This is also a link to our new Libguides setup, which won't officially debut until August. So far I love Libguides, and I'll blog about it soon. (After I finish getting ready to train our staff on it.)
My Zotero book
Adventures in Library Instruction podcast
- Episode 35: The Guide on the Side w/ Meredith Farkas
- Episode 34: Discovery Layers in the Classroom
- Episode 33: Love the Cataloger; Hate the Catalog
My posts @GSU Library
I Support
Twittering
- Online Zotero workshop July http://t.co/9MFg75aH