Tag Archives: Near field communication

NFC (Near Field Communication)
We watched this video to learn more about this new technology that is increasingly being found in new smart phones.

The video shows how small tags that look like little stickers can be programmed to communicate with NFC-enabled phones and transmit messages or commands to the phone.

Mobile Device Usage at Each CUNY Campus
We took a look at the latest annual “Student Experience Survey” (pdf) from CUNY’s Office of Institutional Research to see data on what technologies students use regularly (see table 6a, which begins on page 22). We were surprised that 74% of Baruch students report regular use of a smart phone, a number higher than what we had expected.

LibGuides
We shared a number of hacks and workarounds for LibGuides.

Make the tabs for a page taller by inserting the HTML tag <br> in between two of the words in the page name:

For an example of a guide with tall page tabs, see Sandy Roff’s recent guide to European history.

We also talked about the custom fields that we can add to the template for all librarian profile boxes. Those fields could include things like space for a biography, recent publications, courses taught, etc. The admins for our account can set this up. For details on what’s involved in setting it up (just a few minute’s work), see this help guide from Springshare: Additional Fields – Profiles in LibGuides.

If you want to link to a specific box on a specific page, you can get the URL for that box by following these steps:

1. Click “Edit” in the top right corner of the box you are interested in and then select “Edit Box Info” from the sub-menu that appears.
2. In the “Edit Box Info” window that opens, click the tab labeled “Box Link and Embed Code”
3. The URL for that box should be the first thing shown on the tab you’ve opened. Copy that URL and use wherever you want to send your user straight to that specific box.

If we want to republish a box on some other web page (such as a page on the library website), you can just grab the embed code that appears in the same place you get the box link.

Finally, we looked at the way that you can use an image instead of text for a link. When you are adding links in a “Link Box” you can use the HTML for an image in the “link title” field:

So on the “Managing the Sources You Find” box on the guide for undergraduate honors theses, the link for Zotero doesn’t just have the plain text “Zotero” but instead an image found on the Zotero website. You can find the URL for an image you want to use this way by going to another site with the image you want and then right clicking on the image; after you right click, look for a menu option labeled “copy image location.” That will grab the URL for the image that you’ll need when you are adding the link in your LibGuide.