Category Archives: libguides

Replacing libguides’ annoying “email me” buttons

I did some JavaScripting yesterday that I thought might be of interest to librarians who use LibGuides and LibAnswers. The impetus for this was that some of the librarians at my college were dissatisfied with the “Email Me” buttons that are on LibGuides’ profile pages and profile boxes. I have to agree, the Email Me […]

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Could it run somewhere other than libguides?

As a thought experiment, I was wondering if we could easily get our library homepage up and running on a platform other than LibGuides. On the one hand, this seems like it should be pretty easy, as it’s all HTML/CSS/JS. But nonetheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if there would be some problems lurking in the […]

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Migrating to bootstrap 5

LibGuides seems to have finally begun its long journey to Bootstrap 5. In the abstract, this is really good news. New features! Modern tools! No longer having to worry about Bootstrap 3 being EOL! All good stuff. But in practice, I think this might ultimately mean a lot of work for our library. Our library […]

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AR, part 3

Over on the Springshare Lounge, I was asked for some detail about how our new augmented reality game works, so I posted the text below. I thought it might also be useful to share this here… This [AR game] was built on a new Group Homepage, starting with a completely empty Homepage Template. Starting with […]

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DX and vue in libguides

While I was very optimistic about Vue Single File Components (SFCs) a few posts ago, I’ve been having some trouble implementing them in LibGuides. While you can upload whatever JavaScript you want to a LibGuides group (as “Customization Files”), I’m beginning to realize that the LibGuides interface really wasn’t meant to accommodate a SFC workflow. […]

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Minimum viable website

In my last post I talked about pushing back on the complexity of JavaScript frameworks. Now I’m thinking about taking this further. In the name of maintainability, I think I am going to make an alternate version of our library page: a “minimum viable website”. I’ll strip out as much of the JavaScript as absolutely […]

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Break everything day

Since our library has had LibGuides, there has been a long-simmering desire among the librarians to standardize the layout of our guides. In fact, a few years ago we attempted to do this by building a standardized template that the librarians were encouraged to use. But this voluntary standardization did not work at all. The […]

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Hours widget

When we built the current library webpage in 2021, I wrote a homemade widget in JavaScript to display the library’s hours. It has worked consistently since then without any problems, perhaps surprisingly, since the code is very ugly. This original version of the widget drew upon a custom JSON file with the hours data, which […]

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LTI

My colleague Jeffrey Delgado and I have been setting up Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) to integrate our library’s LibGuides with the broader campus BlackBoard ecosystem. The advantage of this is that it will put library content in more course shells, and hopefully extend the reach of our guides and our other web content. The downside, […]

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Why we need version control in LibGuides

LibGuides doesn’t have version control. In my opinion, it really should. I’m not the first to suggest this. I am told that others have also requested this feature. Hopefully Springshare is working on this. One of the hurdles in implementing version control is that it can sometimes be confusing. Git is certainly daunting to newcomers. […]

Also posted in git, version control | Comments closed
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