"To Think too Long About..."

From ALA; Peters Township (Penn.) Public Library

“To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.”

Eva Young

On-Demand LibGuides Analytics Another month, another LibGuides asset run. For the “month” of September 26 - October 23, the featured tutorial, Introduction to Interlibrary Loan had 17 views! That is the most views of any video for any month (featured or not). Not sure what to attribute the slightly higher views to. Was it the subject matter, the fact that more staff are starting to look at the Featured Tutorials page, or the addition of the video player to the Featured page so that it looked more like the others? Not sure but I will be keeping the video player on the Featured page from now on. 

This month, the new Featured Tutorial will be How to Use Advanced Search in Scopus. This will also be the first month I’ll update a banner on the library’s website to coincide with the updates so we’ll see if that helps attract people. 

Rare Book Virtual Exhibit This week I finished the Famous Mathematician virtual exhibit. On Thursday, my boss, my co-worker, and I met to discuss. Overall the changes were minimal, a switch of paragraphs here, a change of forward and back buttons there. This means that we’ll be able to start marketing the exhibit to staff members soon. It was decided that we will also have the books available for viewing in the library as we normally would during non-COVID times. The ten books will be displayed in glass cases with an informative printout. Though there isn’t currently a monitor for moving displays, we’re hoping to get access to one so I will also put together a slideshow that has a bit more information than the displays can hold themselves. 

Virtual Escape Room: LibGuides Webinar I attended a LibGuides webinar for creating a virtual escape room. I love how many tutorials and webinars LibGuides has for its customers. The ones I have attended are also very well done and stick strictly to their timelines. The webinar was helpful only in ways to set up the puzzles within the escape room. The host used a LibGuides service we do not subscribe to. However, I've seen the San Antonio Public Library create virtual escape rooms with Google Forms and other platforms so the setup, design, and creation of the puzzles from the LibGuides tutorial was beneficial in that sense. I wanted to create a virtual escape room as part of the Famous Mathematicians exhibit but my brain is fried and it ended up being more of a quiz than a fun appropriately-themed game. Still, it's something we might be able to incorporate in another place.