LibGuides
LibGuides is on the tongues of many people. I spent a lot of time reading posts, content from the LibGuides site itself, and its demo. It was a little confusing for a while. But here’s what I figured out.
- It’s a product that you can buy (for some reason I had thought it was free and open source–silly me).
- It’s a product that lets you create subject guides, then embed the content from those guides with little windows wherever you like (on any webpage, including social software sites).
- It seems to be geared toward academic and perhaps school libraries
- Links (to databases, the catalog, eJournals, etc.), guides, videos, audio, RSS feeds, polls, and documents
- You can tag the guides, and users can find them that way or through subject browsing
- Users can rate the guides
- Librarian guide creators get their own profiles showing info about you and if you’re on IM using MSN/Yahoo/AOL
- You can also integrate Meebo or Plugoo windows into LibGuides if you want to
- You can create academic department or course-specific guides
- You get detailed stats on each guide
- Guides can be public or private
- Multiple people can collaborate on any guide
- It can be integrated into Blackboard
- You can install a shortcut into your web browser so that whenever you find a link or site you want to add to a guide you can do so with a few clicks
You can view a demo site here to see what it looks like yourself.
LibGuides seems a lot like a swanky-looking wiki with a lot of open source features pulled all together in one place. All in all, I think this would be a really useful product for an academic library, especially for a library where the staff plan on creating new subject guide content regularly.
We are creating subject guides in our library right now for our new website…and looking at this product, I am tempted to jump on it. However, because it’s not free, and what we’re doing right now is free, I don’t feel tempted enough to change gears completely to use this new system.
June 25th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Does anyone know what the cost is? It looks perfect for what we need at Oregon State University (I viewed the online demo).
Laurie
October 16th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Laurie,
I have been told by some in the “know” that it is about 800 dollars a year.
October 23rd, 2007 at 8:36 am
You posted in June that you were just starting to work with LibGuides – would you mind sharing your opinions now, a few months in? My library’s thinking about adopting, so I’m looking for all the perspective I can get!
October 25th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
I actually decided NOT to use LibGuides, but to build subject guides another way. So, sorry–can’t comment any more on LibGuides than I already did.
February 21st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Hi Sarah – So, what are you using now instead of LibGuides?
February 21st, 2008 at 2:50 pm
My current employer doesn’t have anything the equivalent of what LibGuides does. I believe that some simple database programming on the back end can create something quite lovely. Learn how to pull data from Excel spreadsheets, which the library staff can fill with the recommended books/databases/websites, and let the webpage pull from those files. That’s my solution – but it does require a programmer. Another option is just a simple HTML page for gosh sake.
April 6th, 2008 at 7:33 am
We just signed up for libguides and are learning its features. Take a look at the libraries at http://libguides.com who are using it.
It is a subscription hosted service, below $1,000 year.
I don’t need to be a programmer,to enable library 2.0 features. I can ask for updates and know they will be considered. It enables librarians to be content experts .