Matthew Reidsma

Work Notes

Updates from the GVSU Libraries’ Web Team.
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LibGuides is now loaded over HTTPS

At long last, we’ve finally switched one of our most used tools, LibGuides, over to HTTPS. This is especially important as Chrome is releasing a new version of its browser next month that will flag every webpage loaded without HTTPS (i.e. every library webpage ever) that also has a form as “Insecure.” (Over 60% of our users use Chrome, and all other browsers will follow suit.) We’ve worked hard to earn our users’ trust, so we don’t want a browser update to undo that.

Thankfully, Springshare has been working hard to support HTTPS on all their tools. We’ll be moving LibAnswers (the Knowledge Base and Chat) over soon, as well. The only tool we aren’t able to move over now is ScholarWorks because HTTPS is not supported. (It seems that bepress has been distracted from supporting their product lately.) So, after October 15th, anyone visiting ScholarWorks in Chrome will see a warning in their browser that the site is not secure. This is especially disappointing since ScholarWorks is our most visited online tool at the library and directly represents the work of our faculty and students.

We’re not completely done with LibGuides yet, though. All the images that have been added using “http” instead of “https” will still trigger security warnings in all browsers, so Tessa and I will be working on updating all of these images.

For LibGuides creators going forward: do not link your images to a server that does not have https in the URL. Instead, download the image, upload it into LibGuides, and link from there. (This also means it won’t be one of the dozen broken images we have to fix every week.) Let me know if you have any questions!