SpringyNews - Stay Agile With Flexible Technology

The world moves faster than it used to and with technology focused on delivering what people want with fewer barriers, specifically tailored, and ever so quick -- people have really developed a desire for this pace and personalization. No one wants to wait for anything anymore. People don't like having to sift through stuff that doesn't apply to them. Is it an impossible standard to maintain? We'll see. But what we do know is that libraries who are more agile do a better job meeting and exceeding service expectations. Happy patrons use the library often. They carve a place for it in their lives. And, they'll fight for it and support it.

Being our flagship product, LibGuides has been around the longest and has grown in its capabilities by expanding its features. It's ever-evolving as we respond to the needs of our clients. Springshare endeavors to make sure that LibGuides helps you concentrate on serving the needs of your patrons with speed and fine execution. Here are some tips and tricks you can employ to stay agile and responsive.

1. Start By Knowing What Services Are Important To Them -- One of the key principles to being an institution that listens, cares, and responds is that you have to gather feedback. Understanding your patrons is critical to improving your services to meet their needs.

• Use the new LibWizard v2 Conditional Email Notification to designate it so that if the patron selects your library's weekly blog post as the thing they can't live without, an email gets automatically sent to the head of the blog post crew. LibWizard is included with LibGuides CMS!
• Having this super-direct path to the powers that be will help you stay more agile because the data gets expedited into the right hands. This is particularly important when the feedback is negative. The days of action items clogging up the committee channels are no longer acceptable. This new Conditional Email feature will help you pivot when necessary.

2. Maintain Clear and Steady Communication -- When you're raising the level of your customer service, it's imperative that you be as communicative and transparent as possible about your library. 

• Reassure your patrons by consistently supporting the anchoring services as you communicate to them about new, ongoing, and future projects on the docket, and even who's who on your team via the LibGuides blog. 
• Customize the URLs of your published blog posts. Promote your library blog and work on getting folks to subscribe to its RSS feed so staying in-the-know will be easy.
• Build LibGuides for long projects that affect their overall ability to access and use the library. This is a good way to show folks you're serious about keeping them in the loop. 

3. Create a Culture That Supports Innovation and Collaboration -- In order to be a dynamic, responsive library, you have to nurture not just your team's ideas but the whole idea-generating process. If you don't allow people to take leaps and get caught in the wind, you risk a lot of self-editing and apprehension in the brainstorming room. It's best to hear all the ideas because that's how to get to the right ones.

• Foster an active use of the internal system discussion boards in LibGuides CMS. It's not enough to create a discussion board - you have to both get in there yourself and also make sure to use and promote the ability to subscribe to email notifications to a discussion board thread to your team members. This will ensure the conversation keeps flowing and it doesn't become just a place to post things and then forget about them. 
• Once the boards are humming with activity, keep them useful by adding discussion board tags like FAQ Project, Teen Programming Remix, or Outreach 2019 to help keep your projects organized.
• A rose by any other name might not be findable! Make sure you come up with strong, descriptive titles for your threads. There is a helpful Search Titles search box that you can teach your staff to use, but they're searching the thread titles -- not replies or content -- so make sure people give the titles some thought. 

4. Make Sure The Design In Place Reflects The Needs of Your Patrons -- You could be coming up with great programming and be unveiling all sorts of new ways to improve service, but you can't lose sight of how you share this information with your audience. 

• Keep working on the accessibility of your library web content. There are many aspects to focus on when you're engaged in accessibility progress. We always recommend capitalizing on LibGuides' ability to add default alternate text to an image in the image manager. But you should also consider our feature that lets you disable the use of the H1 and H2 heading choices in the rich text editor. This can be done by going to your LibGuides CMS System Settings > Accessibility tab and clicking Disabled.
• This will make sure you can disable the header elements by default in order to make it so heading choices begin with H3 to maintain the hierarchy of information on the page mandated with WCAG 2.0.

Streamlining your guide building is the name of this game. Learn how to build storage guides and style guides that will help you efficiently create guides that your patrons and staff will love.

Don't miss excellent opportunities to attend new classes that complement our beginner-level sessions so that you can continue to acquire new skills and grow right along with us. 

Training Tidbits: Creating a Summer Reading List with Books from the Catalog and Gallery Boxes

• Wed, June 19, 2019 at 12:30pm U.S. ET

Best Practices for Building LibGuides and Accessibility Tips

• Mon, June 24, 2019 at 2pm U.S. ET

We had an update recently! You can check out the Updates page in this issue of SpringyNews, but if you want a quick peek at what's new in LibGuides, here's a quick summary.