Best Practices for LibGuides at UCLA

Your guide doesn't live in isolation. It's part of a collection of guides, a collection which should be consistent and easy to navigate. Design and label your guide in context with all of the other guides. Remember, your goal is not only to get people to the right guide but to steer them away from the wrong guides. Some questions to ask:

• When someone sees your guide in the browse by subject page or an A-Z list, will they know which one to choose?
• If there are two guides with similar or overlapping titles, how will people know which one best fits their needs?
• Are you repeating information which your reader may have encountered in other guides?

Consider options for consolidating guides, defining clear boundaries between guide topics, collaborating with other guide owners, and making use of hyperlinks and shared content.

Published guides are visible to everyone on the web and are indexed in all of the public access points (Guides by subject, by librarian, most popular/recent, browse all guides, librarian profiles, search results).

Private guides are visible to eveyrone on the web, but are not indexed in any of the public access points. The only way a user can find it is if someone actually tells them the URL (or links to it from somewhere). Other LibGuide authors will be able to find it in the All Guides Index. The intent of the Private status is to allow you to publish a guide to a limited audience. You could use it for a course guide you wanted only the students in the course accessing, for a guide in progress that you wanted to preview to a few faculty for feedback, or content you simply want visible to all LibGuides colleagues.

Unpublished guides are visible only to the guide's owners and editors (or to one of the admins) when they're logged into the LibGuides system. They show up in the All Guides Index, but can't be viewed by non-editors.

Though we use the term "libguide" among ourselves to talk about guides created using the LibGuides content management system, our users don't really care what software we're using. After all, we don't call our printed handouts "Microsoft Word guides."

In all public communications, a libguide (and any other type of guide we create) is just a "guide." If you want to be excruciatingly exact, it's a "UCLA Library online research guide." Use "LibGuides" only if you're referring to the software platform which hosts the guides.

In order to make the Research Guides home page serve as a true portal to all of our guide content, we can create redirect guides which automatically send users to an external URL. This allows us to put guides created in Drupal or any other platform "into" the Libguides system, where they'll be indexed and listed along with all the regular Libguides.

To create a redirect guide, simply input the Redirect URL in the Guide Information when you create it. Your guide will still have a title, description, subject headings, and tags in LibGuides, but anyone clicking on the guide will be taken to the external URL.

Even if you know who you want to target, your guide can be seen by everyone on the web, so it's important to consider who else might find it and want to use it. Look at how your guide is listed in the system and ask yourself: "What type of users are likely to find this guide? What will they be expecting to find?" Some examples:

• If the guide has a course number in the title, then people not in that class are unlikely to use it. If they do, they'll realize that they're not the target audience and adjust their expectations accordingly.
• The more general library instructional guides are sometimes explicit in naming their target audience, e.g. academic mentors or student athletes.
• Other instructional guides will be self-selecting by the nature of the content: library veterans aren't going to head for an "Introduction to the Library Catalog" guide.

The big problem is the subject guides. When you have a guide about "History" you're going to get everyone from incoming freshmen to emeritus faculty. Creating a guide that will work for all of those people is difficult, and there's no solution that will work for all subjects. However, here are a few strategies you can try.

• Attempt to write for the "middle ground", achieving a style and structure that will work for both beginners and experts.
• Segregate your content, targetting different audiences on different pages. This can be done explicity with pages like "Getting Started" or "for Grad Students". Or you can base it on your expectation of who's likely to select certain tabs, e.g. make the "Books" page more introductory and the "Primary Sources" page more advanced.
• Choose one audience and write for them alone. In this case it's a good idea to specify your target audience in the guide description or in a box near the top of the home page, e.g. "This guide is intended for faculty and grad students in the Departments of X and Y". If you're really kind, you can even provide links to more appropriate guides for the "wrong people" who visit your guide, e.g. "Students and researchers unfamiliar with Specific Subject X may want to start with the more general resources listed in the Broader Subject guide."