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SpringyNews - Moving Forward

May 2020

Recent Updates - March & May

The LibCal team has been busy, busy, busy! Here are some recent high points:

Conduct online appointments and events seamlessly with new Zoom integration! Connect your license to LibCal to automatically generate meeting URLs right from the appointment and event. 

  • See this newsletter's Online Learning page for more details for one-on-one online Appointments functionality.
  • Hosting online events on multiple platforms? Use LibCal's new online event location type to add your Facebook Live URL, Microsoft Teams room, or any other meeting space.
    • Enable registration and optionally add a password to the event to secure the URL.

Account permissions:

  • Managing staff across multiple branches and departments? Need to allow a student worker to view bookings but not create them? You asked for more options to customize access to LibCal's different modules, and we've been working on adding them! Since March, we've added new Hours and Equipment and Spaces permissions. Check them out on the Remote Staffing Workflows page.

Event Calendars:

  • You can now attach files to events! Now you can share any pre-workshop materials with your attendees right from the public event page.
  • Custom form fields are now visible right from the Registrations and Waitlist tabs. Hooray! You'll find these responses by clicking on the 'columns' button pictured on the right.

Equipment & Spaces:

  • Here's another fan favorite: pattern and stripe options for grid availability to improve accessibility. No more CSS workaround required. Find them in the Admin > Equipment & Spaces > Settings area.
  • Bulk cancel Space and Equipment bookings in case you need to quickly shift library hours again due to COVID-19 related closures. Easily use existing bookings to create new bookings once it's time to reschedule them.
  • Copied Equipment & Space bookings will now check the Banned Email list when creating the new booking.

Additional updates:

  • We’ve added an email notification for Exchange/Google sync/auth failures.  Currently, this email will alert any emails that are added for Appointments OAuth and EWS connection errors and Spaces OAuth connection errors.  Future support is coming for Spaces EWS and Appointments, Calendars & Spaces Google connection errors.
  • We added new language options for the Appointments booking page and Equipment and Spaces locations with inactive items and/or spaces.

 

Training Opportunities (U.S. ET):

  • Check out our upcoming live LibCal sessions featuring online events, holds pickup, and more!
  • Drop by SpringyU where we have LibCal Blocks and Courses for self-paced learning designed by YOU -- so it's always the class you need at the right time.

LibGuides and LibApps have some new features to share with you:

Many of you have asked if you can pair your LibApps logins with your single sign-on (SSO), and now you can in LibAuth! As of May, you can now:

  • Require SSO authentication for LibApps login.
  • Limit that LibApps login to a group defined in your SSO.

This means that a) you can hide the LibApps login screen and direct logins to your organization's instead, and b) that you can revoke access to LibApps simply by removing that person from your authentication system's group specified in your LibAuth configuration. We hope this is helpful, especially for large institutions!

​LibGuides tabbed box change:

  • In our May release, we introduced a new version of tabbed boxes built with Bootstrap, rather than jQuery-ui, which is being deprecated for security reasons. Hopefully, this is not news to you as you already saw our March blog post and login message regarding this update. :) In case we missed you, and you were using custom code to style your boxes, we have more information on how to update your CSS in this FAQ.

Additional features and fixes:

  • As part of the plan to move all sites to HTTPS-required, we removed the option to add new Amazon book cover images as they generated insecure HTTP images. Existing images will continue to be displayed until your site is changed to be HTTPS-required. When this change is made, these images will no longer appear in your site. See the Upcoming Updates box for more on our HTTPS-required plan.
  • We fixed an issue that caused guides in Internal Groups to be missing from the public guides list and search results when logged into LibApps.
  • To help prevent accidental deletion of guides, they can now only be deleted from Content > Guides.
    • Pro tip: create and double-check an HTML backup first!
  • To help prevent accidental breakage of LibGuides pages, we:
    • Introduced code that will examine Guide, Page, and Box titles to make sure that what is included there will not break the page. You can still include tags to make these titles bold or italicised, and you can still use a FontAwesome icon at the beginning of a title.
    • Changed the way that Content Box and Blog widgets are generated so that they do not include jQuery by default.
  • Now when you navigate through a guide via the keyboard, your cursor will stop on the description fields for non-database assets.
  • We fixed an issue preventing the saving of Alt Text when creating a new or editing an existing Book from the Catalog asset.
  • We made the User Privacy Alert more accessible by making sure it is the element in the page first encountered by screen readers.

 

Training Opportunities:

You'll swoon at all the great new things the developers have worked on for LibAnswers clients:

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The May release brought a big update to the Queue question form builder, making it more flexible and easy to use! Now you’ll be able to: 

  • Use up to 15 “custom” questions, which can be any of our available types: free text, dropdown, radio button, or checkbox fields.
  • Easily create and reorder form content.
  • Accept file uploads in an embedded form widget!

Language Internationalization:

  • We're thrilled to roll out new admin-side translations!  Currently, the LibAnswers dashboard, LibChat operator dashboard, Ticket Create and Answer, Ticket Knowledge Base Explorer, and Chat Transcript pages can be viewed in any of our supported base language customizations.
    • To date, in addition to English, we also support French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, and Serbian (Cyrillic).
    • We're working on expanding translations to more admin-side pages and adding languages.

Queues and Tickets:

  • Do you aim to respond to patrons within a certain window of time? In our March release, we added a new reply timer to visually indicate how much time you have left to answer or how long an answer is overdue. You can enable it in Admin > Queues > Edit Queue > General Settings.

FAQs:

  • For sites who manage a lot of FAQs, we've added a "bulk edit" feature so you can bulk publish/unpublish FAQs and/or change their group assignment in one fell swoop!

LibChat

  • Need to add an internal note to a chat? Now you can right from the dashboard. It'll be visible to LibAnswers accounts in the transcript.
  • New options to email a chat transcript.
  • By customer request, we made the initial question and tags visible in the Transcripts area. They replace the IP address column.

24/7 Chat Cooperative:

  • We've added language internationalization to the Co-Op dashboard, LibChat Feedback Tab, Chat Statistics, Chat Monitoring Activity, and Add/Edit Account screens.
  • Librarian names will now display for users outside of your home region in transcripts, instead of displaying “Unknown.”
  • Chat Transcripts from users outside your home region will now display as expected.
  • Transcripts will now display all results, instead of showing a limited number of transcripts when using certain filter combinations.
  • In addition to displaying Co-Op chat monitoring activity, in March we added an Institution Coverage Report, which displays the total number of chats that were claimed and answered during each shift.

QuestionPoint Data Portal
With the March release, we added a special portal page for viewing historical QuestionPoint data for former QuestionPoint clients. This portal page includes the top-level Institution Stats report for viewing stats on the total questions answered by each institution.

We’ve also included a portal for each site’s previous QuestionPoint Service History, which provides access to the past 3 years’ worth of chat and email interactions from your QuestionPoint system. Admins can head to Admin > QuestionPoint Data and select a report or transcript to view.

Miscellaneous Updates:

  • Tag color picker to identify types of tags using visual cues.
  • We fixed window targets in the question form and in System Status Management posts so that they open in a new window if set that way.

 

Training Opportunities:

We're fired up to bring you these LibWizard updates:

In March, we released the long-awaited privacy scrub tool! Now you can specify which fields in your LibWizard items are scrubbed on a rolling, monthly basis.

  • Admin users can head to Admin > System Settings > Privacy Data Scrub page to complete the form and activate this feature for your site.
  • There are a few fields that you can optionally set to scrub system-wide: IP addresses and submitter information (name, email, phone).
  • Once the scrub is activated, additional fields can be selected to be scrubbed from their individual forms, survey, quizzes, and tutorials.

Additional Improvements

  • We fixed the issue where individual feedback wasn’t being saved properly for existing fields.
  • The ‘Jump To Slide’ function when previewing standalone slides now works as expected.
  • Data Submission Notices are displayed properly for all tutorials.
  • We’ve fixed the issue where the banner header was still being displayed for widgets in pages that have the ‘Do Not Display Banner Header’ checked.

Accessibility fixes:

  • We’ve added additional color settings for feedback styling. This includes wrong, correct, and informational feedback looks.
  • We’ve fixed “Link Purpose” errors on the form, survey, quiz, and tutorial list pages.
  • We’ve added appropriate descriptive labels for the F/S/Q/T list pages, field editor modals, Admin pages. Text input fields have the appropriate descriptions via aria-label tags.
  • The ‘title’ on public forms has the proper ‘title’ tags.
  • Tutorial > Select/Edit slide breadcrumb color has been updated to conform to W3C’s color contrast criteria.
  • We fixed an error coming from the top navigation menu.

 

Training Opportunities:

Check out some of LibStaffer's cool new features and some fixes:

Schedules/Shifts

  • We’ve added the ability to filter a schedule's view by position if the option to autoschedule by position has been enabled.
  • We’ve corrected an issue when editing shifts that have been previously synced to Outlook. Any edits will correctly reflect changes in Outlook.
  • We fixed an issue causing the end date to not appear when editing a recurring shift using the ‘From This Date Forward’ option.
  • The 24-hour time format correctly displays in the Schedules calendar view, shift details time display, and picker.

Time Off:

  • Elevated Regular users who have the ability to approve Time Off will only see accounts associated with the schedules where they have permissions.
  • We’ve corrected an issue where the ‘All Day Event’ was not working properly at the start of Daylight Savings Time.
  • The 24-hour time format correctly displays on the Time Off calendar view and Time Off record entry time picker.

Holidays:

  • You can now enter Holidays using a date range vs. adding the days one-by-one! Head to Admin > Holidays to check out this new feature.

General and Accessibility fixes:

  • An issue has been corrected for the LibCal Hours integration that caused opening hours to not display on the schedule view.
  • We’ve fixed a problem on the ‘Staff’ report where in some scenarios, regular user accounts had access to the admin clock in/out functionality.
  • Accessibility fixes have been completed for the ‘Copy Shifts’ page and Time Off calendar and staff timeline view.

 

Training Opportunities:

Looking for some LibCRM news about what's new to the system? Look no further:

Check out the newly redesigned Reports area!

  • Create and save report templates
  • Refine report results with additional filters, such as Interaction Type and Interaction Source
  • Select custom fields using the "add/delete filters" option

Interactions

  • In the March release, we added new customization options for Interactions. Now you can create and manage custom types in their own tab and add custom fields, just like with Profiles. Certain basic Interaction system fields (title, source, location) will remain in the system to ensure data organization.

Profiles

  • Need to quickly create a new type from a Person/Organization or Interaction? We've added an "add new type" link so users won't have to navigate away from the profile to create one.

Making data-driven decisions in 2020 will be easier than ever with these new LibInsight features:

We've been working behind the scenes to refactor the code for our LibAnswers, LibCal, LibGuides, and Google Analytics datasets.

Additional features and fixes:

  • User sessions data is now fetched properly for the LibGuides dataset.
  • In COUNTER 5 dataset analysis, we have changed the way that the Top 100 Databases / Journals / Books / Others Titles Report is generated, to ensure that you’re seeing the Top 100 Titles for each individual metric. Formerly, we pulled the Top 100 Titles by Total Item Investigations then sorted by other metrics.
  • We fixed the issue with deselecting affecting the “Include Cost-Per-Use-Analysis” checkbox for COUNTER 5 analysis.
  • The Custom Dataset Search and Replace tool now works with field data that contains slashes (‘/’).

Upcoming Updates

The pandemic has changed how and where we’re able to gather, and the LibCal team is adding features to address this new normal:

Our online Appointments and Events integration with Zoom was received with great excitement, and we’ve heard your requests for more meeting software options!

  • The team has already started on Microsoft Teams integration, and while there’s not a release date yet, we’ll get this to you as soon as we can.
  • Do you utilize Zoom webinars to host larger online events? We’re looking to add integration so you no longer have use Zoom meetings if you have a Zoom account that has the webinars functionality.
  • Additionally, we’re looking into incorporating password generation for meetings/webinars that require them.
  • For increased security, we're also working on Zoom OAuth app integration, in addition to the current JWT app.

While the Spaces module was created with different types of library spaces in mind, new social distancing measures require specific considerations with the use of building space. We’re developing new features to manage individual seats within these spaces.

  • We’re still ironing out the details, but with this new functionality you will be able to define how many seats are available in a particular LibCal Space, and where and how these spaces are grouped in the library.
  • When a patron wants to visit the library, they’ll reserve a seat. You'll provide time and duration options, like you do for any library Space, and the system will automatically take Space and building capacity into consideration for a seat’s availability.
  • Admins will be able to easily get a live count of how many seats are booked in a single Space, and in all Spaces in LibCal.

Finally, we’ve begun working on one much-requested Appointments feature! In the coming months, we’ll be adding the option to centralize some appointments settings, including associating a booking form with a location/group and appointment type, rather than the individual person. This will greatly help library staff who provide both tech help and research assistance appointments.

We’re working our hardest to get these much needed LibCal features to you as soon as we’re able! Keep an eye on our blog for future developments.

We have a few important messages for LibGuides plus a popularly-requested feature in the works:

In March, we let folks know about an upcoming update to the rich text editor (RTE). At the time, customers had the option to try it out early, but now we are preparing to release it to all sites this summer. If you'd like to make the switch now, let us know by filling out our form!

  • The same functions will be available in the new RTE, but you will also enjoy its cleaner look and built-in browser spell check capability!

As previously announced, we will be moving all sites to HTTPS-required this summer now that browsers are starting to enforce the secure HTTPS protocol.

  • We'll be in touch with you again before this happens, but it's not too early to prepare by looking for mixed content.

Also this summer, we will be deprecating the older v1.0 LibGuides API in favor of the v1.1 API (guides, assets, accounts, subjects) and the v1.2 API with OAuth2 (database assets). If you have website content that is currently using the 1.0 API, please update your calls to use one of the newer versions.

Later this year, we will begin to adapt LTI 1.3 to take advantage of its new features and improved security.

  • This means action must be taken on your end - but not to worry! It won't impact your manual content placements or guide/E-Reserves metadata.
  • However, you will be required to work with your Blackboard, Canvas, or Moodle admin (if that's not you) to set up another LibGuides tool in your LMS with the updated URLs and Secrets by the end of 2020.

Finally, we will be rolling out popularly-requested improvements that will allow you to easily make some customizations that currently require CSS (like setting colors for tabbed boxes!). 

We'll be sure to provide more details about all the above changes on our blog, so please keep an eye out there this summer for more information!

We've got some exciting things lined up for LibAnswers/LibChat!

  • Collecting patron feedback on your online reference services? We’re working to include the option to automatically send a LibWizard or third-party survey link at the conclusion of a ticket/chat interaction.
  • We love LibChat screensharing, and our customers and their patrons have loved it so far, too. Now, we’re looking to add some general improvements, such as an easier way to use your own license.
  • In the coming months, Shared Group Systems will see improvements to their statistics - we're working on making it easier to view data on total chats answered by and created by each participating institution, for simplified aggregate reporting
  • Our development plan shifted a bit to address immediate customer needs resulting from the pandemic, but we still have adding customizable sound alert settings for LibChat on our list! When it’s released, users will be able to select from several new sound options as well as customize the sound for incoming chats, designate ongoing chat sounds, and new ticket alert sounds. 

Stay tuned for these exciting updates to LibStaffer: undefined

  • We are actively developing personal time zone features for remote workers that live in a different zone from the LibStaffer system time zone! 
    • This functionality will help easily manage situations where staff members are spread out across different time zones. Development is already underway, and while it involves a lot of moving parts, we hope to have an exciting announcement on our blog soon.
  • Remember when we added Locations and Departments to begin organizational hierarchy support? We'll be rolling out features tied to these settings, as we have for Positions, in the coming months.