Day 2 - Getting Onboard the Intranet

Springy_Will · 2023-08-07T20:53:34+00:00

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Session information: https://training.springshare.com/springycamp/2023/onboardintranet

Georgia Southern University's Libraries Website Committee efficiently employed Springshare tools for training and management. They established a LibGuides-based internal intranet, integrating the Springshare setup into onboarding for all new hires. Librarian training expanded to cover LibApps usage. Utilizing LibCal, they developed two internal tools: an equipment reservation system and a save-the-date calendar, enhancing equipment booking and event planning across libraries.

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Comments

Groomej

Love watching poi, esp. fire poi.

csheldonhess

This one gave me some things to think about. We have Confluence, courtesy of our campus IT. We also have Google Drive. We also have Microsoft Teams/Sharepoint/OneDrive. We also have a shared mapped drive (that really resembles the comment about what a mess things can become over time).

I don't think "throw in LibGuides Intranet" is a solution by itself; obviously, this is a problem of organizational will and nobody having direct ownership over keeping this stuff in order, not technology.

But I'm a technologist, and I really liked the shared calendar and internal equipment borrowing ideas. 😄

Springy_Meg

Awesome presentation, Wilhelmina, thanks for joining us!

I've seen a few examples of folks using LibCal for internal equipment, but it's almost always technology related (laptops, STEM kits, etc.). I love that your system is really… everything. That was a huge missed opportunity at a previous job I had, with 20-some branches, all with various things (furniture, supplies, programming do-dads) but no catalog of everything, much less a reservation system. It meant a lot of spending scarce budget on something you could have just borrowed from another branch.

wrandtkeGS

@csheldonhess My campus has Google Suite, no training available for Google Suite, and no other internal document sharing solutions!

Really, how we are using LibGuides is not to store the files, but instead to give structure to files stored elsewhere. A committee LibGuide will tend to have several pages on the committe LibGuide, and some of those pages will be lists of documents with outgoing links to specific Google Docs. A common page might be something like "Meeting minutes" with an outgoing link to several Google Docs of meeting minutes. The LibGuides provides the structure, navigation, and context. Meanwhile, my Google Drive homepage likes to put some random document I opened years ago right on top and I have to search a lot to find things in Google Drive and I have to know exactly what I'm looking for. Also, within LibGuides, being able to smoothly ensure there is permission to view is great. In software for storing documents, like Google Drive, sometimes a file can be invisible to some employees because it was not shared with them. Google Drive can be like email - a file shared last year to last year's employees and invisible to a new hire. Having an incoming link from the LibGuide means that the existence of that Google Doc is knowable and highly visible, and the person can request share permission.

I didn't live click and show, but LibGuides provides a simple entry point and structure, and then the multipage long documents, meeting notes and agendas, old reports, etc. are not directly uploaded to LibGuides, but instead LibGuides links out to them. The Georgia Southern LibGuides intranet has a chunk of content in LibGuides, then also has a function to provide structure and context to a Google Drive intranet and long multipage documents tend to be in Google Drive with an incoming link on LibGuides.

By having Confluence, that's actually a pretty good tool for storing long detailed documents. It lets someone subscribe to updates for a page, and it saves the edit history, such that if someone accidentally deletes material, it's possible to restore the deleted content fast with no fuss. My guess would be that the barrier with Confluence might be campus not allowing multiple people within the library be able to administer a subarea within it, such that it might not be possible to quickly ensure someone could access everything on the intranet (ie. campus politics might be a barrier to using Confluence as the very first entry point of an intranet).