CiL2008: Engaging the Audience 2

The second half of the Engaging the Audience session was Temple University showing off how they use LibGuides to run their subject and course guides.

This is spiffy. Go poke around the guides and see for yourself. The presenters explained that LibGuides is:

--easy to use
--simple to customize to the look and feel you want
--flexible - you can organize each guide in a number of different ways, including resource type, time period, and topic
--interactive - far more so than their previous guides. Patrons can input comments on items, tag them, rate them, and get email alerts. The guide maintainer can add RSS feeds to the guide, a suggestion box, and a poll. And several other things that I couldn't write fast enough to record. :)
--There are a number of widgets you can add, including a calendar to add schedules things.
--There's a search function in the guides
--You can embed video
--You can make guides for specific courses, as well as subjects
--They often embaed course guides within particular subject gudes

They tracked stats - for just one of the subject guides, the Criminal Justice one, the use of the guide more than doubled in the first month alone.

They admit the guides need marketing0 they talked them up in classes of library instruction, and made stickers to distribute around campus.

Springshare, the company that makes LibGuides, has a Facebook app that you can use to allow people to add subject guides to their Facebook page. And you can embad the guides in Blackboard courses.

There's an article in the journal Code4Lib 2(2008) by Corrado & Frederick on this.

Not convinced yet? You can find the presentation here at MadInkBeard.com.

I'm quite impressed and think we should look seriously into this. The guides are more versatile and attractive than ours right now, and would stop use spending so much time tracking down errors and fixing the database. I picked up a brochure from SpringShare and plan on pushing it in the face of a couple of you when I get back. :) There's other software out there that does similar things - I'm not sold on this particular product - but I think we should give some serious thought to updating our subject guides in a way that allows someone *else* to take on the burden of the technical work.