Best Practices for LibGuides at UCLA

The subject terms being used for our research guides are the result of a fairly intensive debate by a joint team from the Research Guides Management Team and the Drupal Discovery Content Team. The list is intended to serve as both a taxonomy for guides and the top level of a multi-level taxonomy for databases. A lot was borrowed from the original LibGuides subject system guidelines. The goal was to create a short list of top-level subjects that are easy to browse. It's important to emphasize that these are browsable subjects that are supplemented by a full-text search box.

That said, the LibGuides subject list is constantly evolving. Many people have made suggestions along the way, and most of them have resulted in improvements. So please, send your concerns and suggestions for alternate terms or different groupings. We've actually left one slot empty for the subject we didn't think of. However, in general if you want to add a subject be prepared to nominate another for deletion. It's not enough to argue that your subject is important enough to have its own entry. It's got to be more important than something already on the list which can be bumped or merged.

Ordering Lists of Guides under Subjects

The LibGuides system automatically lists guides in each subject aphabetically, but this often puts the major guides low on the list. Unfortunately, unlike LibGuides 1, we have no way to re-order guides within a subject right now. This is at the top of our wish list to Springshare!

In addition to categorizing guides by Subject, LibGuides v2 also groups them by Type. The system came with six default types (listed below), which we can re-name but not add to. Though the guide type does not display to the user, it controls a lot of behind-the-scenes functionality, so it's important to choose the right one! Specifically...

• The guide types appear as filters on search results pages.
• We're using the guide type (along with tags) to define the dynamic lists generated in the Guides Directory.
• Once the functionality is in place, we hope to use types to sort the guides within the subject lists on the home page, so that instead of one long alphabetical list it will list subject guides first, followed by topic guides, course guides, and general purpose guides.
• Internal Guides and Template Guides are suppressed from being indexed on the home page lists.

Definitions

• Subject Guides - Use for guides that are about academic disciplines, e.g. Education, African American Studies, Medicine, Chemical Engineering.
  • Doesn't have to be a discipline taught at UCLA, e.g. Genealogy, Agriculture.
  • Use for exceptionally broad material types, e.g. Maps, Government Information.
  • Use for area studies guides covering whole regions, nations, or languages, e.g. Chinese Studies, African Studies, Spanish and Portuguese.
• Topic Guides - Use for "smaller" topics, the type that might be covered by a single course, e.g. Opera, Renaissance Art, Health Disparities.
  • Use for most material types, e.g. Musical Scores, US Census, Canadian Goverrnment Publications, Vital and Health Statistics, Reference Sources, E-books.
  • Use for area studies guides covering sub-national regions or aspects of a nation, e.g. Tibetan Studies, Jewish Los Angeles, Chinese Literature, Vietnamese Film.
• Course Guides - Use for course guides!
  • Also use for the UCLA Common Book guides.
• General Purpose - Use for guides about the research process.
  • Research advice, e.g. Getting Started, Advanced Research Methods, Citing Sources
  • Using the Library, e.g. Choosing and Using Databases, Powell Community Collections
  • Research tools, e.g. Endnote, BrowZine. Mobile Apps, GIS
  • Data management
  • Guides for specific user populations, e.g. Library Resources for New Science and Engineering Graduate Students
  • Guides for exhibits, workshops, and other short-term events. Like course guides for seminars, these should normally have the date in parentheses at the end, along with a one-word category (if it's not already in the title. Examples: (2017-18 Exhibit), (Fall 2017 Workshop).
  • This is the group most likely to be re-named or broken up
• Internal Guides - Use for private guides only intended for use by Library staff.
• Template Guides - Do not use (unless someone creates some template guides).

New in CMS: Metadata Fields

Do not use tags to provide alternative search terms! That function is now handled by Metadata fields.