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SpringyNews: Inspired Instruction

September 2015

LTI Smart Search Enhances Student Experience Automagically

New LibGuides CMS Feature

With the new LTI Smart Search, students will always get the right LibGuide delivered directly into their online course (Blackboard / Moodle / Sakai / Canvas / etc.) regardless of the type of guide. The best part is that the LTI Smart Search does all this automagically.

Just to recap, LTI allows you to integrate your LibGuides content into any LTI-compliant LMS. Read more about LTI-integration and watch a video here.

Even better, faculty don't have to do anything. As long as the LTI Tool has been added to the base course shell, it will automatically appear, already setup per their course parameters, in their online course. So forget about getting faculty buy-in and training faculty on adding LibGuide-related resources to their online course.  Let the LTI do the work for you!

Here's How It Works

Connect a field in your LMS to your LibGuides Metadata fields (Guide > Mini-Command Bar > Guide Metadata). Assign that same Metadata field to multiple guides, and the LTI tool does the rest of the work by matching the LMS field with your Guide Metadata field and returning the right guide(s) into your LMS. No match? No worries! There is a built-in failover option that will direct users to a useful page instead of displaying the dreaded "404 Not Found" message.

LTI Metadata

Search Options

  • Exact - Matches on the passed metadata fields exactly.
    • - A search of 'ENG 102' will only retrieve LibGuides that contain that exact metadata value.
  • Wildcard - A 'contains' search that searches on both sides of the passed metadata field.
    • - A search of 'ENG 102' will retrieve 'ENG 102', 'ENG 102a' and 'Smith ENG 1020'
  • Starts With - Returns all results that start with that passed metadata field.
    • - A search of 'ENG 102' will retrieve 'ENG 102 ', 'ENG 102a ' and 'ENG 102 Smith'
  • Stepped - Runs the search on the passed metadata field, and if no matches are found, it reruns the search, stepping down each iteration (i.e. removing one character from the end each time) till it finds a match.
    • - A search of 'ENG 102' retrieves no results. Search is rerun stepping down to 'ENG 10' and then 'ENG 1' and then finally 'ENG', where it  returns a match with the English Subject LibGuide.

Efficiency For The Win!

Setting up and adding the LTI Smart Search at the base course shell means that it will be automatically added to every single course. So, for every English Composition class/track offered, your LTI Smart Search will be auto-enabled. Librarians / Guide authors just need to add the proper metadata fields at the guide-level, and voila! They'll automagically display in the online course. 

Everything Is Awesome

Students will *always* get the right LibGuide delivered to their course. Faculty don't have do a single thing. And the Library comes out looking like aces. With LTI, everything is, indeed, awesome.

LTI Stepped Search