A Technical Perspective on Why LibGuides are Used at Scotch College
Over recent years, the library at Scotch College has undergone a dramatic change to incorporate more information technology throughout the services it offers. This drive has not been to remove books but to connect students to the digital resources that the library purchases in a more efficient manner. The directive for greater integration between library and information technology has led to the development and integration of a suite of online software provided by SpringShare. The reason why this software provider was selected is very straight forward: they specialise in library systems and provide an integrated suite of products that provide a custom environment where the library can connect its resources. Below is a list of the software that we subscribe to, written for other technical support teams to understand why we have taken this path.
LibGuides
LibGuides is effectively a CMS system that allows the library team to generate websites that are used as research guides. These research guides, formerly referred to as pathfinders, are websites that allow the teacher librarians/library staff to collect and organise links to various resources for teachers and students. This process was once done through Word documents, and likely still is in some places, which were emailed out to students, however, these were not utilised well or user-friendly. The question from many IT departments is, why do you want to use this over something like WordPress or similar website-generating software/services?
- It’s a product built for libraries by library people.
- At an out-of-the-box level, it is easy to customise to a limited degree.
- The system has content boxes such as ‘books’ that are specific to inserting books into the websites without custom CSS.
- The widgets inside the system limit how many times an individual can break the page and therefore problem-solving is reduced.
- It has SSO capability.
- It has defined security levels.
- There are no costs for the amount of data used.
- It can be hosted in different parts of the world for speed.
- All LibGuides can be shared to the world and the library team can directly copy a guide from other school, if that school has allowed that in the preferences.
- All training is online in webinar format.
- Support is included in the yearly cost.
- Schools can HTTPS the service if they wish.
Consider this now for any other website service such as WordPress:
- Technical teams need to set up a server, install the service and configure all of the settings such as file size uploads, etc.
- Technical teams will need to problem-solve any plugin issues and this is ongoing.
- The support and training will need to be done online, by the technical teams and by tech-savvy staff in the library.
- Ongoing maintenance and back-up of the service.
In general, the simplest answer for this for technical teams is based around how much time they want to spend supporting the library in a technical manner. If you’re after sustainability, my recommendation is to purchase this product and then outsource the custom CSS of the site to a third party. This means the library will have a product that takes minimal time for technical teams to maintain and can look great with a small amount of outlay. At the end of the day, at Scotch College we have invested significantly in this platform and customised the CSS to give our boys the best chance at locating high quality resources. It should be noted that time needs to be spent making any website look great and this is no exception. I would highly recommending spending money for a third party to customise the look and feel.
Quick Links
Scotch College research guide home page – https://library.scotch.wa.edu.au/researchguides
Scotch College custom home page in Libguides – https://library.scotch.wa.edu.au/senior
SpringShare LibGuide Community – https://community.libguides.com
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