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Best Practices for LibGuides at UCLA

Suggestions and guidelines for using LibGuides to best effect in the UCLA Library.

The Home Page

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Every Page Is Home

It's the nature of the web that users may reach your guide from many different access points, not necessarily those you have created. So every page needs to be named and organized with the assumption that the user hasn't seen any of the other pages in the guide yet.

For many subject guide owners, there's always the big question of what to put on the home page. What do you do when all the things you have to say are already covered by the various "titled" pages?

Here's a good rule of thumb. 50% of your readers should be able to find all the information they want on the home page. If they can't, you're wasting their time forcing them to hunt for no good reason.

Some options for home page content you may not have considered:

  • Descriptive information about the collections.
  • A place for comments or feedback.
  • Highlights of new or featured resources .

Some things to avoid:

  • "Quick links" to the library, departments, etc. People know how to Google that stuff.
  • Links to related guides. This can go on the home page, but should be near the bottom. Unless you really want to send the message "This is probably not the guide for you, so before you even start with it, consider trying one of these others." (That's actually a valid concern if you think people are using your guide who shouldn't be. But it's usually better addressed by re-titling your guide in a way that the "wrong users" won't get to it in the first place.)

Whatever you do, remember that your guide's home page is prime real estate, and that many users will judge whether or not it's worth going to the other pages based on what they find there.

Page Names and Order

In order to simplify navigation across guides, the Research Guides Management Team has developed the following rules for page and box titles.

General Rules

  • Use the name of the thing users are searching for: Articles, Books, etc.
    • Don't call it Finding Books or Get Articles, unless you specifically need to contrast with another page/box that's about Losing Books or Eat Articles.
    • Avoid generic categories like Web Sites or Internet Resources that concentrate on where or how you look for content rather than what the content is. If you need a category for multi-format collections, try using more descriptive terms like Web Portals or Archives, even if a big jargony.
    • In keeping with the above rule, you usually don't need a page for Databases. But if you do, make sure to link to all types of databases; either duplicate database lists from other pages or include cross-links to those other lists.
  • Avoid combo terms like Journal Articles or Article Databases, unless you're using them to differentiate from a neighboring page/box titled Magazine Articles or Statistical Databases.
  • Subject guides should use the terms and page order listed below, but there's more leeway for course guides. Course guides should still default to these practices, but may use alternate terminology and order of presentation when required to sync up with the syllabus.

Specific Pages

  • Home may be re-named Getting Started or other descriptive alternative.
  • After Home, your first three pages should be Books, Articles, and Reference Sources (in any order). You don't have to have all three, but the ones you do have should be up front.
    • Books should include any e-book content, either integrated or in its own box or sub-page. If e-books are especially important in the field, you can name the page Books & E-books.
      • This is also a good place to put Dissertations if you don't have a separate later page for it.
    • Articles can be sub-divided into Journal/Magazine/Newspaper Articles, though News can also be its own later page (in which case a cross-link won't hurt).
      • There's standard wording you can use to explain why your Articles page is listing a bunch of online databases.
      • You can include a box or sub-page titled Journals or Key Journals as long as it actually lists journal titles or links to tools that search periodical titles.
    • Reference Sources can be sub-divided into the usual categories, or you can just skip the meta-category and dive straight into pages for Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Handbooks, etc.
  • Next, move on to the more specialized content types.
    • You can use Primary Sources as a category, or just list specific content like Statistics, Goverrnment Information, Tests, Scripts, etc.
    • Book Reviews are problematic since they could logically go under Books, Articles, or a top-level page. Wherever you put them, consider re-using or cross-referencing those boxes on other pages where people might look.
  • Finally, you usually want to end with any pages devoted to Info Literacy-type content, though if you don't have much of this it can probably fit onto the home page.

The "Other" Page

Try to avoid creating pages titled Other, and More, or Miscellaneous. In regular texts there's some expectation that the reader will keep turning pages and eventually get to the "miscellaneous" information no matter what you call it. But in hypertext, readers jump about. Without at least some indication of what's on the other side of a link, your readers have little reason to click on it to see what's there. Anything you put onto an Other page will only be seen by people who are bored and have time on their hands.

Unfortunately there's no easy solution to this problem. There probably are items of interest which just don't fit neatly into the other categories you've defined but which are disparate enough to lack any easy way to describe. Your best bet is to simply shoehorn those links into other places in your guide.

Source Documents