new toys! new toys!

So I’m working away at the template for the libguides and at the same time I’m busy creating the psychology libguide.  Why I’m doing both simultaneously is that I’m trying to make the template a “how to” as well.
Today Ms. K showed me “Flipboard” which is a curating tool on the ipad.  Basically you use it to create your own online magazine.  It’s really really cool because it’s so nice and graphical and glossy. OMG what a great tool for teen girls – instead of all that crap served up in Seventeen and Cosmo you could curate and create a magazine for a girl with a mind!   No adverts, no self-loathing of the body after reading. The possibilities are endless.

Anyway, I made up a little mock flipboard for psychology and populated it with some articles and then was shown a rather clever trick to get it into libguides.  Which I’ve promptly forgotten, so I’ll need to check out what I did and do it again …

OK, so the first thing I did was email the URL of the guide to myself, and then I made a screen shot of the cover (command / shift / 4)

Using free text edit, I put in the picture (using width = 100%) and then added a link to the flipboard behind the link…  It looks really cool in the libguide, but really was quite easy!

We’re jointly curating some flipboards for each of the subjects so that it can be part of our “in the news” section as a cool graphic.

Of course down the road the issue will be to keep it current and interesting and changing for the more dynamic subjects.  A really good example to look at is the WW1 flipboard created by Adrian van Klaveren he has (as of today) 3,691 readers, 81,166 page flips and 281 articles!

I’ve spent enough time on screen time now, so it’s time to log off and switch off.