SpringyCamp October 2016: Designing for Your Users

Jennifer Ferretti, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Decker Library - Maryland Institute College of Art

Within 24 hours of publishing the LibGuide "Beyoncé's 'Lemonade' and Information Resources," it was viewed over 17,000 times and has close to 60,000 views to date. It has been shared by countless librarians, institutional library accounts, Library Journal and School Library Journal, New York Public Library and the President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, among many others. It has been reused by librarians and incorporated into library instruction sessions and academic courses. In this session, the guide's author, Jennifer Ferretti, Digital Initiatives Librarian at Maryland Institute College of Art's Decker Library, will discuss how the guide was developed and how topical LibGuides can be utilized to support information literacy.

Resources:

Melissa Del Castillo, Virtual Learning & Outreach Librarian 
Barbara Sorondo, Health Science Librarian - Florida International University

The FIU Libraries have created a series of interdisciplinary LibGuides to meet pressing patron needs. These guides are a collaborative effort across library departments to teach andengage our users about newsworthy events of local and international (and interstellar) interest. This presentation will discuss how these guides were created in an iterative manner in response to our users’ immediate information needs, and grew as new information was released.

By attending this session, LibGuides users will learn how to plan, create, publish, and promote guides on current events for their communities efficiently and effectively. Our highlights include research guides on this summer’s Pokémon GO craze, the local Zika outbreak in South Florida, and an upcoming horror-themed guide for Halloween.

Resources:

Isabel M. Duque, Learning Resources Librarian, InterAmerican Campus Library - Miami Dade College

The creation of the Black Lives Matter LibGuide was inspired by the collaboration of professors from all fields wanting to discuss and make connections to social issues we face today as a people. As librarians, we have the opportunity, responsibility and as well as the ability to become the mouthpiece for these communal projects to come alive and become accessible to all. By creating these guides we craft a space that is tangible, spurs on interaction and is a gateway to learning. In addition, this guide also serves as an invitation for our faculty and student body to further explore the resources that the libraries have to offer and includes us in all campus wide conversations. Thankfully, the community response was phenomenal due to other faculty expressing curiosity in working with the library and embedding us into their courses. Also, students started to frequent the library more often because in their classes librarians were invited to speak and consequently became known as their main access point for research.

Resources:

Melissa Del Castillo, Virtual Learning & Outreach Librarian - Florida International University

Alvin Dantes, Digital Initiatives and Technology Librarian - The Art Institute of Chicago

By combining analytics and a simplified design, our libraries' public facing LibAnswers platform was able to better meet the needs of our patrons. FIU Libraries had completed the migration to v2 the previous summer and wanted an update to the design. Using data from statistics and Query Spy, we wanted to offer popular answers front and center. The design is a nod to sites like Netflix that are visually focused and intuitive. We opted to redesign our LibAnswers from scratch rather than revise elements. The final product is clean, efficient, and visually striking http://libanswers.fiu.edu/.

Resources:

Amanda Peach, Instruction and Reference Librarian, Berea College

This session will examine the ways in which LibWizard plays a critical role in the library instruction program at Berea College’s Hutchins Library. For example, Bibliographic Instruction Requests are collected using a LibWizard survey, which uses conditional logic to offer our faculty an a la carte menu of instruction options tailored to their input.  We will also look at how interactive LibWizard training modules, with quizzes built in as comprehension checks, serve as a cornerstone of the training program for our large student staff. The ways in which LibWizard surveys allow us to make quick work of assessment, including providing us insight into the user experience of patrons of our one-on-one reference consultation service, will be addressed. Learn from our experience and see for yourself how LibWizard makes creating instruction tools and artifacts like these, as well as many others, as easy as waving a wand!

Elissa Checov Manager of Library Services 
Song Yang, Director of Distance Education - Gwinnett Technical College

​LibGuides have transformed faculty, student, and administration perception of the library. Once a “provincial outpost” with a small collection of books, the library is increasingly integrated into faculty teaching. Elissa will discuss how we have used LibGuides to increase library usage and be valuable to the college community. In January 2016, the college changed its LMS from ANGEL to Blackboard Learn. Song anticipated extensive technical support and communication. We purchased an additional queue to handle the volume of inquiries. The beauty of this was the users didn’t have to change their process for asking questions and getting technical support. In addition to effectively handling and tracking the questions from faculty and students, the data collected from the Queue worked to build a Knowledgebase.

Emily Newberry, Web Services Coordinator & Reference Librarian - University of Michigan-Flint

When UM-Flint decided to switch our CMS to Drupal, the library needed to decide if we would host our content on Drupal, or if we should use LibGuides CMS and start from scratch. Using Drupal would mean relinquishing control over how our students searched for materials and basic layout of our homepage, but using LibGuides CMS would mean cutting ties with our ITS department in terms of support for our pages. We had conducted some usability tests and had a good idea of the kinds of things our users wanted. We opted to use LibGuides CMS and we haven’t looked back. The flexibility of the templates in LibGuides 2 means that we can code boxes to search and display the appropriate content , the way we want, whenever we need to. We don’t have to put tickets to our ITS department when we need to change something. All the platforms Springshare provides are seamlessly integrated to allow us to meet the changing needs of our students. Our homepage doesn’t really look like a LibGuide, but it has all the “springyness” that we’ve come to expect from Springshare. 

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Going All In: Redesigning the Library Website with Springy Suite

Dana DeFebbo, Web Services Librarian - The University of Texas at Austin

This past spring, the Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas at Austin, migrated an aging and outdated website from Drupal 7 to a newly redesigned site built on the LibGuides CMS platform.  In addition to LibGuides CMS, we also launched LibAnswers, LibChat, LibStaffer, LibCal and LibWizard.  We very literally went all in on Springshare.  This session will talk about how Tarlton decided on Springshare as our primary web content platform, and how we replaced a number of aging homegrown web applications with Springshare products.  Additionally, I will also talk about the redesign process and the information architecture research gathering we performed and future an upcoming implementation of E-Reserves for a past exams database/archive.

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