The LibGuides Guide

Before creating a guide, take these few steps to ensure users can get the most of your guide, and you're efforts are as impactful as possible.

1. Check to see if there's already a guide covering the same material. If there is, great, see if you can collaborate with that guide owner to add to or refresh the guide.
2. State your intended audience(s). If the guide is supposed to be for everybody, it ends up being for nobody. You can make a general purpose guide, but you'll want specific content for specific audiences. An undergrad writing a 200 level term paper will need more contexualizing and overt directions than a PhD candidate writing a dissertation.
3. Once you've defined you audience, next it's time to decide which type of guide you're creating. Subject, general topic, or course. Below there's specific tips and structures that will be uniquely useful for each of these guide types.
4. Start building your guide! Use the side navigation to set up your main pages, and boxes within those pages to organize your content

This section will talk through various considerations a libguide creator will need to address while defining their audience.

• Who needs this information?
• How do you foresee this information being helpful?
• What do they need to understand in order to effectively use this information?
• What skills do they need to use in order to navigate the information resources?
• Are there any quirks, features, or hacks that a user would appreciate knowing about before click through to the information resource?

Guide types

There are currently four guide types available, Course, Subject, General Purpose/Topic, Instructor

Course Guides

Course guides are guides created in collaboration with an instructor, course coordinator, or department. These guides are primarily student oriented, and as such, are most useful to students when structured to follow the research and writing process. Depending on the level of the course, these guides could be used to gently introduce students to information literacy concepts, or they can be very targeted in their content to help students find specific literature about the course topic

Research Guides

These guides are the broadest guides in terms of scope of types of resources. Research guides correspond to specific academic departments or programs. This is where you can direct users to all of the specialized databases, effective search terms, and seminal literature in the discipline. Tabs are a great way to create spaces for multiple different audiences to find the amount of support appropriate to their skill level. If you liaise with highly interdisciplinary departments, consider collaborating with other subject librarians to co-create those guides together.

Topic

Topic Guides are where you can get most creative on themes and topics of your guide. Topic Guides can range from large interdisciplinary topics that span multiple programs to specific topics you might encounter throughout your academic journey. You can focus on practical applications of the disciplines or where everyday users might encounter information pertaining to your subject expertise. Remember that LibGuides are predominantly meant to guide users through library resources, so when linking out to popular resources be sure to include guiding language to help support users information literacy skills to evaluate the use and usefulness of these resources.

Instructor Guides

This is a new type of guide that is being piloted. These guides are for large programs and departments. They can be thought of as the Instructor facing version of a course guide. Perfect for Train the Trainer type programs, workshops, and outreach.

Setting up your guide's navigation

As a general rule of thumb, the guide should have 4-9 side navigation pages. If you have less than 4 pages, consider if it can be part of another guide, or if you're covering the content thoroughly enough. If you have over 10 pages, consider restructuring and condensing pages, or if this guide should be split into multiple guides.

Much like how you'll want to consider the audience, use, and type of the guide you're creating, you'll also need to consider from the outset how you want to set up the navigation for your guide. The way you name your pages in your guide dictates the labels in the side navigation of your guide, and the way you organize the content on your guide will dictate the way you name your pages. Here's some guidance on how these interactions might play out:

Course Guide

If you're creating a course guide to help students and an instructor navigate the information resources available to them for a research project, consider organizing your guide around the research process:

• establishing relevant topics
• searching broadly
• searching in specialized databases
• reading in the field
• literature reviews
• citation practices and management

Topical and Subject Guides

These types of guides are also heavily influenced by who your target audience is. If the guide is to aid expert researchers in quickly finding different types of resources, then it might make sense to organize at the page level by

• databases
• books
• primary sources
• newspapers

But if the subject or topic has many subtopics or is relatively complex, then it might make more sense to organize at the page level by subtopic, and then organize by resource type at the box level.

How do your faculty and students think about the information?

Thinking through this question as you organize the navigation and page structures of your guide can help the decision making process. If you know people in that field think about source types as discrete and separate, then it makes sense for you to organize that way. Matching the navigation structure with people's existing schemas for thinking about the subject or topic will make your guide more intuitive to navigate.