[Web4lib] Questions for LibGuiders

[Douglas Goans]

At GA State we built an in-house CMS many years ago. We decided to go with LibGuides last fall and are currently transitioning out of our in-house CMS to LibGuides. Over time, our proprietary CMS became more difficult to maintain and upgrades to offer better services for both librarians who want to create and embed content were being hindered. These limitations also halted improvements in the user interface design and the experience we wanted to offer our end-users. Our CMS was also being used for much more than the research guides but the workflows we built into the system had become problematic if we just wanted to maintain a simple set of web pages.

LibGuides provided the standardized interface and support for librarian generation of content that we had with our CMS but also offered out-of-the-box improvements in embedding channels of content. Our limited time and personnel are now free to maintain and develop applications and extend functionality from our other systems (ie. Metalib, SFX, other portions of our CMS, blogs, etc.) to *work with* libguides instead of building a research guide platform alone. Future plans will also include exploring how to pull in libguides or channels from guides tailored to specific audiences within our campus portal.

LibGuides makes a lot of that possible. It's still new and evolving but that's a quick overview of how things look for us at this time.

http://research.library.gsu.edu/

-DG

Doug Goans
Web Development Librarian
Georgia State University Library
100 Decatur St.
Atlanta. GA 30303
Tel: (404) 413 2772 
Fax: (404) 651-4315

>>> Mark Gooch <mgooch at wooster.edu> 3/16/2009 4:41 PM >>>
For those of you who are using LibGuides, are you doing so because you 
don't have an "easy to use" CMS for your website.  If you do have an 
"easy to use" CMS were there other reasons for going to LibGuides?

Thanks
Mark

-- 
Mark D. Gooch
Technology and Government Information Librarian
The College of Wooster Libraries
1140 Beall Avenue
Wooster, Ohio 44691
Phone: 330/263-2522
FAX: 330/263-2253
mgooch at wooster.edu 
AIM: mgooch90
Yahoo! IM: mgooch1



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