I  haven’t been posting since I started my new job on June 1. I have been busy and thoroughly enjoying every moment. It’s Saturday, and I’m actually at the library now. Most of our new student orientations are during the week, but there are a few on Saturdays. After some morning presentations, I got the opportunity to welcome and speak with students and their families ¡en español! at the information fair. I really enjoyed it, and I think I helped people feel welcome. I have a couple more presentations this afternoon.

Coming in early today gave me a chance to watch a recording of a LibGuides CMS webinar that my manager sent me. She and the library’s technology manager attended the webinar on June 19th. I came from an institution where it took several years just to get a link to the library on Blackboard, so the features introduced by Springshare’s courseware integration tool are a bit amazing. Here is the rundown of the webinar.

Instead of being compatible with specific course management systems (CMSs), it is Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) compliant, so as long as your campus’ CMS is also LTI compliant, the LibGuides CMS will work with it.

With LibGuides CMS, not only can you display a LibGuide directly in your campus’ CMS (when you click on the link in the CMS, it opens directly in it), you can also add other things, such as a chat window, your library’s hours through LibCal, a list of the specific subject librarians, LibAnswers, and an A-Z list of subject-specific databases.

The webinar instructor did a great job explaining and showing step-by-step how you, at the CMS course shell level, can add a subject LibGuide to a slew of subject-specific courses though the automagic tool. You can also do this with class-specific guides. Changing between a subject and class-specific guide and vice versa is very easy. You can also add a single guide to a single course though manual mode. If you are wondering about usage statistics, those are also readily available.

The webinar also covered an upcoming update to the A-Z list in LibGuides. The A-Z list will be on its own page in both LibGuides and LibGuides CMS. There is also a place for internal notes and a way to mark certain databases as popular or be able to hide, say, a trial database. There is also going to be a keyword feature to increase discoverability. Only LibGuides CMS will have access to community analysis, which will allow you to see how many people in the system have a certain database, etc.