Themed week on SubjectsPlus: guiding users to resources

Published:

3 Oct 2011

The focus of the EIFL-FOSS Themed Week October 10-14, 2011 was on SubjectsPlus, a free and open source tool that enables librarians to create online guides and manage online content; and provides end users with an easy to use interface to browse or search for resources.

This flexible tool has empowered subject librarians by allowing them to quickly create and update websites that are tailored to meet their users changing needs. SubjectPlus provides efficient management of online content while eliminating the need for library staff to have in-depth knowledge of website design or HTML coding skills.

Online presentations provided information on the latest versions of SubjectsPlus and demonstrated how one EIFL library in Zimbabwe has implemented it during the past year.

About SubjectsPlus

SubjectsPlus is a free and open source tool (created at Ithaca College Library in the USA) that enables libraries to create and manage online research guides. Usually created by subject librarians (and therefore requiring no specialist technical skill), these guides can take many forms, with the software sufficiently flexible to allow many different ways of presenting the guides and enabling users to access them (for example, users may want to navigate by subject, by course, by database or by the type of information they seek).

For more information about SubjectsPlus, see our main SubjectsPlus page.

Online Workshop

The EIFL-FOSS Themed Week focus centred around a free online workshop on SubjectsPlus on Monday 10th October 2011.

The guest contributors to the workshop were:

Andrew Darby, Head of Web & Emerging Technologies at the University of Miami and author of SubjectsPlus
Amos Kujenga, National University of Science and Technology, Zimbabwe and EIFL FOSS Coordinator for Zimbabwe

The workshop is supported by an open access wiki for Questions and Answers about SubjectsPlus.

To view the recording of the session, go to http://www.instantpresenter.com/eifl/E953DC87864C - Please note we had a technical difficulty in getting a connection to Zimbabwe, so had to fall back on a pre-recorded presentation. Please watch the recording only to Slide 41 (24 minutes 30 seconds into the recording), then pause the recording to view Amos' presentation on Youtube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEdFOb4OG-c) before returning to the recording and sliding forward to 47 minutes, where we pick up the questions with Andrew.

You can download Andrew's presentation here

You can download Amos' presentation here.

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