There are lots of good reasons to use shared content. It reduces confusion: if everyone is using the same content, then we don't have twenty different versions of the information out there. It provides a more cohesive structure to the site. It makes the site look more professional. But the best reason of all is: Shared content will save you time!
Shared content can be a page, a box, or an individual link. And while there are "official" sources of shared content listed below, it's important to remember that any page, box, or link in the system can be re-used and shared.Your biggest source of shared content will probably be your own guides. If you create a "Quick Links" box that you think is important enough to include on every page in the guide, don't make lots of different boxes, which you'd have to edit separately any time you make a change. Just make one master box on the home page and then re-use it on all the others. If you're using that same "Quick Links" box in many of your guides, then put the master copy in your unpublished or private "My Masters" guide.
Technically, all Links in LibGuides live "outside" the guides. When you create a new Link, you're actually creating an "asset." If you later delete the Link from your guide, the asset continues to live on and can be mapped in other guides. This becomes important when it's time to manage your guides.
You can reuse any Link in UCLA's guides. (That's Link with a capital-L, one added using the box's Add button. You can't reuse links embedded in regular text.) Simply choose Reuse Existing Link in the Add Link dialog box. Type the first few letters of the name and the system will search for matches.
You can actually manage all of your Links in the Assets list (under Content in the menu bar). Take a look at it and you'll quickly see why it's easier to manage one Link that's "mapped" to multiple guide pages rather than dozens of duplicate Link entries.
There is, however, an official source of Links, and it works differently enough that LibGuides gives it a separate content type: Databases. Databases reside in LibGuides' built-in A-Z Databases system. When you add a Database to your guide you're automatically adding a shared link. Only LibGuides admin accounts can edit the A-Z Databases. You can, however, customize or hide the description.
You can reuse any box in LibGuides. Just click on Reuse Existing Box in the Add Box dialog. You'll be prompted for the name of the guide, then provided a list of all boxes (organized by page) to choose from.
The official source of shared boxes is the Master Boxes guide. The Research Guides Management Team is developing a suite of sharable pages and boxes to cover most services and basic information literacy, which will be stored here.
A normal redirect URL is a bit of code on a page that tells your browser to automatically forward your to another page. In LibGuides, putting a redirect URL on a page also replaces the regular navigation links to that page with direct links to the new destination, skipping over the page entirely.
Shared pages work exactly like shared boxes. Just click on Reuse Existing Page in the Add Page dialog. You'll be prompted for the name of the guide, then provided a list of all pages to choose from.
Note that a mapped page will have the header, footer, and navigation from your guide, though it will retain the profiles boxes (if any) of the original owner(s).If you want the user to actually go to a page in another guide, don't reuse it. Just create a blank page and add a page-level redirect URL to the destination page.
Technically, any link, box, or page can be reused, but it's often easiest if you keep all of your "master" content in one easy to find place so you know where to look for it when you want to reuse it or edit it.
The easiest way to do this is to create an unpublished guide called "[your name]'s Masters". There you'll be able to keep a collection of master boxes and pages which you can reuse over and over in all future guides. You can even share your Masters guide with other LibGuide editors by making it private rather than unpublished.
Note that re-used content can be nested. You can have a master "how to cite" page that reuses a link box from some other guide, which in turn reuses links from the A-Z Databases list.