MLibrary 2.0 Projects

There's a Facebook group called LibGuides in Facebook, and in it, Ken Liss, a completely awesome COMM Studies librarian at Boston College (and really, what COMM librarian isn't awesome?), wrote a good description:

Here’s my quick take on Springshare's LibGuides, which may help get some discussion going.

There are really two pieces of LibGuides:

1. LibGuides itself, a tool for libraries and librarians to organize, format, and present content in guides hosted on Springshare’s servers; and

2. The Facebook application, through which students and others can find, search, and interact with guides created by their school’s librarians directly from within Facebook.

At this point, most of the LibGuide content is in a demo library called Springshare Library. You can access this on the Web at http://demo.libguides.com/ or via Facebook. (Add the LibGuides application in Facebook, then select Springshare Library as your library.)

There are demo guides there, of various types and in various stages of completion, put together by Springshare staff and by people, like me, who have signed up for demo accounts. The idea, as I understand it, is that libraries that subscribe will have their own LibGuide libraries, with their own banners, branding, and formatting. They will also have direct searching of their own catalogs, from their LibGuide Web pages and from within Facebook. (The Springshare demo searches the New York Public Library catalog.)

There’s a lot to discuss, starting with the functionality of the LibGuide tool itself, which has a lot of features and which I’ve found flexible and easy to use. You can request a trial account from the LibGuides Web page (http://www.springshare.com/libguides/index.html) and start to use it. (If I remember right, trial accounts can create up to two guides that go into the demo library.)

Then there’s the Facebook application, which is a little harder to evaluate at this point, but which offers the promise of bringing the content more directly to students. There is plenty to discuss about that, too.

There are other things, too, like pricing -- the tentative price I've heard seemed fairly reasonable -- integration with library systems and infrastructure, and more. But I hope this can get people looking and get the conversation going.