Amanda Etches-Johnson advocated “liberating search boxes” at the Website Improvement Face-off session at Internet Librarian 2009. I whole-heartedly agree with Amanda – but I’d expand upon her statement by saying I think we should liberate any library content we can get our hands on.
To that end, I am following up on my earlier post about embedding LibGuides content boxes into course management systems. We have moved forward with this – my stellar colleague Emily Frigo & I have been collaborating with Kim Kenward, one of the university’s educational technologists. We are doing workshops this semester for faculty on how to embed library content into their courses. We had our first workshop yesterday and the faculty seemed very engaged and interested.
Yesterday, I received an e-mail from a colleague at another university wondering how to embed LibGuides content boxes into Blackboard, so I wrote up a tutorial on how to do this. (My tutorial from July just demonstrated how to embed LibGuides content somewhere; this one specifically shows how to embed into Blackboard.) I thought this tutorial might be useful to others in libraryland, so I am posting it here.
If there is interest, I can write up tutorials on how to embed other types of library resources – we’re sharing instructions with faculty on how to embed Summon search boxes, Encore search boxes, and I’ve also embedded the Millennium search box in various places on the library website.
Honestly, I think this is more to the heart of “going where users are.” I think library presence on social networking sites can be effective, but I feel like this is one way to go where our users are in a way that makes a lot of sense contextually. Our students do their academic work – the work that it is (largely) our mission to support – in Blackboard, not in Facebook.