Last Updated: Oct 24, 2022 Views: 293

LibGuides are research guides prepared by librarians to assist students with their research hosted on the LibGuide platform by Springshare. Research guides are part of the course development strategy for some courses. We have the capability to install these guides into Brightspace courses via LTI. This is strongly encouraged because while it is possible to link to these research guides, installing the guide via LTI embeds the guide into the course and doesn’t take the student outside of the learning environment to see the content.

Installation

To install a research guide via LTI,

  1. Navigate to the module/page where you would like the resource to appear
  2. Then, use the Existing Activities menu to select External Learning Tools
  3. From the Add Activity menu that appears, select Springshare Automatic Launch.
  4. Then edit the name of the item, eg. Shaprio Library History Research Guide.

Students will see the link you named with the subtitle: External Learning Tool. When they click the link, they will see the research guide within the Brightspace environment (a bit like a submodule). The library embeds appropriate metadata in guides tagged for use in Brightspace, so when you or a student clicks the topic link, the correct guide will populate based on this metadata.

Please don't check the box labeled "Open as External Resource". Enabling this box makes the guide optimized for use in Brightspace open outside of Brightspace like a normal link but missing helpful navigation context. 

Troubleshooting

I’ve followed the directions above and guide content appears, but the guide is called Introduction to Shapiro Library, not the guide for the course.

The LTI integration is set up to show you a dummy guide if the guide it’s looking for isn’t publicly available or if the library hasn’t embedded the metadata in the guide yet. Please email eLibrarian@snhu.edu to check on the status of the guide or to request that we publish it temporarily to test the integration.

Librarians must be contacted to add metadata to guides for them to be successfully installed in Brightspace. In cases where designers want to add an established research guide to a course, contact a librarian.

In cases where a guide is replacing an older version, we may be keeping the guide unpublished until a scheduled trade off date in the future. In this case, or situations like it, seeing the Introduction guide is normal.

I can’t find the External Learning Tool Link!

You may not have the appropriate Brightspace permissions to add this tool. If you are a course instructor who would like to highlight a research guide, feel free to link to the library’s research guides in an announcement.

When I click the LTI link, I see the guide content without Brightspace or Springshare header information!

Something went wrong during the installation. The easiest way to troubleshoot this issue is to create a new item following the instructions above. A link opening to content without headers is not ideal- if using the LTI as directed above isn't feasible, please use the external link for the appropriate guide instead. This issue can get tricky- don't hesitate to reach out to eLibrarian@snhu.edu for assistance.

Still Have Questions

Still Have Questions?


Ask an eLearning Librarian! elibrarian@snhu.edu