The latest.
A little while back, I said I might speak further about LibGuides. Now seemed like a good time; I’ve dug into it more deeply and I’ve got a better sense of what it can do.
Overall, I’m pleased. Really pleased, in fact - it’s made creating online tools for the students I teach whys and wherefores of library research dramatically easier and faster, and the fact that LibGuides handles layout and design means that I no longer have to write* CSS to make my web things pretty.
I mentioned in my last entry that the sessions I taught using LibGuides page like this one have been far more successful and engaging to students. The pattern has held - my most recent victory was for a class in research analysis and design for psychology students, and the guide is seeing a lot of hits. My Industrial Psych guide is far and away the leader, with hundreds of hits since I taught the session, and the professor there asked if he could make it a core component of the course from now until eternity (or, I suppose, until something better comes along). It’s working out nicely.
That said, LibGuides has its foibles. I wish the WYSIWYG editor was a little more robust; it tends to freak out on me every so often and dash headlong into the weeds. I wish the layout/color schemes were a bit more flexible and a bit more “aggressive” - pale, gradient fills and gentle shades are a huge Web 2.0 thing, but sometimes I like my colors not to be tentative, rounded, and weak. Sometimes I want the kind of colors that brought terror to coastal populations for centuries.
Sometimes, I want Viking colors.
But those are extremely minor quibbles. In fact, the one thing that gives me real pause as I create more LibGuides is that there is less and less original content going into them. Since LibGuides lets you link to other content you’ve created (thereby fulfilling its essential function as a content management system, of course - why write three copies of the “How to Find Journals” FAQ? ) I end up linking to guides I’ve previously created more frequently than I end up writing new sections.
In fairness, a lot of the information I impart to a psychology class about the way the library works does not change when I speak to a biology class, but after an initial barrage of content creation, each successive LibGuide becomes more an exercise in content arrangement than writing new things. Eventually, I’ll feel like there’s less of me in it, and although I’m not World’s Greatest Librarian, I do think my unique and snowflake-like viewpoint is occasionally useful.
In other news, we’re forging ahead with our Digital Repository project, comparing DSpace and Fedora in a cage match to see which one does the things we want a DR to do. The process is long. But there is progress, which is welcome.
* By “write”, I mean “hiss in frustration at”