SubjectsPlus vs LibGuides

[PeterT]

Hi All,

Does anyone know of a good comparison of SubjectsPlus and LibGuides,
or can make one? The folks here want to do a comparison, and I'd love
to save some time doing so before reinventing such if it's out there.

Any/All comments are greatly appreciated,

Peter

[Andrew Darby]

Peter,

I haven't seen any comparisons of SubjectsPlus and LibGuides. I know
of two articles that compare SubjectsPlus to other open source
options:

Free and Open Source Options for Creating Database-Driven Subject Guides
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/47

The long road towards subject guide 2.0
http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/index.php/2007/10/24/the-long-road-towards-subject-guide-20/

One fundamental difference between SubjectsPlus and LibGuides, is that
SubjectsPlus is free and open source, while LibGuides is fee-based and
closed-source. On a "philosophical" level, this distinction may or
may not matter to your library; me (and I'm biased), I prefer my
software open source. I think it's more in the spirit of libraries
and our mission/role in society. Plus I'm sick of just having to live
with the way proprietary software works.

Overall, I don't know enough about LibGuides to make any sort of nuts
and bolts comparison. And I'm probably not the right person to be
doing so, anyway.

Andrew

[PeterT]

Thank you for your reply Andrew.

I share your bias, it is in the spirit of libraries to use and promote
that which is available to all.

The ballyhoo locally is about "Web 2.0" features, weblets in your face
sort of. I'm uncertain as to the value/propriety of injecting the
library into young adults social space. I could be wrong, perhaps
features to look at in the future.

Thank you again,

Peter

[Amy]

Hi Peter,

I don't have a formal comparison, but can fill you in on how Wheelock
ended up with SubjectsPlus.

We briefly looked at LibGuides, Pirate Source, and Scout Portal
Toolkit before deciding on SubjectsPlus. LibGuides was considered
for the shortest amount of time, since all the other options were free
and LibGuides is not. Being able to create applications for Facebook
was not a selling point, since we felt that students general want to
keep their academic lives and social lives separate. Also, all other
things being equal, I would rather not use a hosted system such as
LibGuides.

Scout Portal Toolkit has some cool interactive features (users can
rate sources, etc.), but was a huge pain to customize and was missing
a number of features that we wanted. Pirate Source was closer to what
we wanted, but a bit of a pain to install and hadn't been updated in
awhile. SubjectsPlus was jussst right. The baby bear of database-
driven subjects guides, if you will.


Amy

[AGD]

Came across this comparison today:

http://theubiquitouslibrarian.typepad.com/the_ubiquitous_librarian/2008/04/student-reviews.html

The test students seemed to prefer SubjectsPlus, the librarian blogger
preferred LibGuides.

[PeterT]

Thank you all for your replies, I'll let you know what the folks here
decided to do and why went it occurs.

I'll be upgrading to the latest version of SubjectsPlus after the
semester ends.

PeterT

On Apr 24, 4:30 pm, AGD <agda...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Came across this comparison today:
>

> http://theubiquitouslibrarian.typepad.com/the_ubiquitous_librarian/20...