SpringyNews - On Your March, Get Set, Go!

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, we're about ready to shake out the winter cobwebs, dust off our outdoor reading spot, and run full speed into warmer weather. If you're feeling a bit restless, we have a new handful of LibGuides tips that will get you and your patrons moving! It's never too early to prepare for the summer busy season.

Is your list of unmapped, unused assets, reaching the hundreds or even thousands?? Our support team can clear this out for you in one fell swoop.

• To do this, we recommend first reviewing our FAQ that outlines the process.
• When you’re ready, submit a support ticket with the information they need. They’ll take care of the rest! 

As you’re working on the task above, you may find you have a lot of duplicate assets, making it difficult to know which one to select to reuse. This could even lead to accidentally creating more new assets. Our support team can assist with this, too!

• This process takes longer since they’ll need to know which asset you want to keep as the “parent” asset, and which “children” assets will be merged into it. 
• Once the merge is complete, you’ll be left with one “parent” asset that includes all of the mappings of the merged assets. The “children” assets will still appear in your system with zero mappings, so it may help to request a bulk unmapped asset delete shortly after.

Want to learn more about merging assets? See our FAQ for step-by-step instructions and the merge template.

Keeping your list of accounts and contacts up to date is good security practice and ensures that the right people are receiving patron questions and important Springshare announcements. If it's been a while since you've double-checked your list, now's the time!

1. Head to Admin > System Settings.
2. Check that the email address in the Admin Email field matches who should receive site-related notifications from Springshare.
3. Check that the address in the Support Email field matches which email or site patrons should contact with database access questions, broken videos and links, and other LibGuides content-related issues.
4. Head to Admin > Accounts.
5. Review the list of accounts and adjust permissions if needed. If someone is no longer at the institution, delete the account. We'll prompt you to reassign content so you won't lose it.

For more on site security, see the Tool Tips page and Friday's blog post.

It’s happened to all of us -- you’re trying to edit your guide, but it’s unresponsive, and you can’t make any changes. There’s something on the page creating a problem! Chances are high that JQuery was included in a search form, chat, appointments, or calendar widget. While you can head to Content > Assets to find and fix a Media/Widget asset and contact the support team if the script is in rich text, a two minute update can turn into a much longer process.

If you're using the Media/Widget asset for all of your custom code, you can quickly find this sneaky JQuery before you realize it's causing a problem.

1. Head to Content > Assets to find your asset library.
2. In the Description/Metadata field, search for a JQuery call. You can do a full or partial search.
   1. Note that a keyword search for "JQuery" will return widgets that use JQuery but may not include the script that calls it.
   2. Not sure what this looks like? Here are a few examples:

      ​<script src="jquery-3.4.1.min.js"></script>
      <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.4.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
      <script src="//code.jquery.com/ui/1.12.1/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>

3. Once a widget is retrieved, click to edit it. Copy all of the code and paste it in a text editor as a backup just in case you make a mistake.
4. Highlight the JQuery code including the <script></script> tags and delete it from the asset.
5. Check your guide where it's mapped to make sure everything looks okay!
   1. Want to do a test run first? Use the original widget code to create a brand new asset. Once the code edit is complete, add the widget to a new guide just for testing. Delete the guide and asset when you're done.

As you're creating LibGuides content, you'll find times where you want to direct someone to complete a form, sign up for a class, or fill out a library card form on another webpage. Website buttons are a visual indicator that a user needs to take an important action, and usability experts recommend placing buttons where they will help your users.

However, it can take time to format and style a button from scratch. Luckily, Bootstrap has some button classes so you can quickly make one! Since LibGuides already loads Bootstrap 3.4, all you need are the right CSS classes. If you want to style them further, you can add your own CSS id or class to the button's HTML.

See Bootstrap Examples

If you'd like to learn more about creating buttons, the training team covers them in our More Fun with CSS & Bootstrap session (37:45 mark). :) As you're creating buttons, we highly recommend adding them to your guides as Media/Widget assets! Then you can create, copy, edit, and fix them from Content > Assets. 

Highlighting a LibCal event? We have an easy event button creator with no HTML/CSS knowledge required! See our FAQ for full details.