Best Practices for LibGuides at UCLA

Hello LibGuides Editors!

This is the first in a new biweekly series of “LibGuides Tips and Best Practices” developed by the Research Guides Management Team (RGMT). The tips will help you take advantage of new LibGuides 2/CMS features and the best practices will provide a better experience for our users by providing consistency across our guides and reducing library jargon.

In this first best practices tip, we would like to draw your attention to a new set of shared terminology we have developed. The decisions about this terminology were made by a subcommittee of our team (which also included Diana King and Sharon Shafer), and were guided by Best Practices for UC Library Home Pages established by HOPS (see attached document).

Summary of Shared Terminology Best Practices:

• Name pages for the kinds of content users are looking for, e.g. Books, Articles, Primary Sources, Data & Statistics, Newspapers, Encyclopedias & Dictionaries, etc.
• Articles, Journals, and Databases are three different things. Try to keep them distinct and define their relationship where necessary. (Good candidate for a shared content box!)
  • Avoid combo terms like Article Databases and Journal Articles unless you're specifically using them to contrast with other sub-categories, e.g. Article Databases and Dissertation Databases, Journal Articles and Magazine Articles.
  • If you have a page called Databases, it should have info on all kinds of databases. You can use individual boxes on the page to divide your recommended databases by sub-disciplines (Botany Databases and Zoology Databases), source (Academic Databases and Government Databases), format (Book Catalogs and Article Indexes), or function (Full Text Content and Index Only).
  • If you have a page called Journals, make sure it lists journals by title or links to tools that search journal titles.
  • If you have a page called Articles, you're probably going to list databases, but be sure to include some explanatory text, such as that on the main Search page.
• For page titles, don't say Find Books or Search for Articles. If you say Books, the user will click on it for all info about books.
  • You can, however, use active verbs or gerunds for activities other than finding library materials, e.g. Citing Your Sources, Find a Subject Librarian
  • Individual boxes on the Books page may be titled Find Books or similar.

For more details, see http://guides.library.ucla.edu/bestpractices/standard-pages and http://guides.library.ucla.edu/bestpractices/services.

For an archive of our new biweekly tips series, see: http://guides.library.ucla.edu/bestpractices/tips.

We would like to encourage all guide owners to follow these best practices not only when creating new guides, but also by editing older ones. To help with this process, the RGMT will be holding drop-in sessions throughout the summer to allow you to work on updating your guides while getting help from members of our team.

Join us for our next scheduled drop-in session:

Wednesday, June 24, 1pm - 3pm, YRL East Electronic Classrom (EEC)

You may have noticed some changes in the LibGuides A-Z List. There’s only one JSTOR! And one HeinOnline, one ScienceDirect, etc. These changes are the work of the A-Z Team, a cross-over team from the RGMT, PIST, and WST. They’re working to transform the A-Z List so that while it will still be based on data from the ERM, it will import records and field selectively rather than wholesale, thus creating a public-facing list that’s both more meaningful to our users and more usable as a source of content for guide authors. Tasks include:

• removing duplicate records
• removing records for “non-databases”
• adding records where needed
• working with SCL to develop new workflows to keep the A-Z List in synch with the ERM without mirroring all records
• updating database descriptions and developing guidelines for ongoing maintenance of descriptions
• potentially adding vendor, type, and subject metadata to enable enhanced discovery options built into the A-Z List functionality

Most of this work is still to be done… there are a LOT of databases. All work is being documented on the A-Z Database Management Guide. The A-Z Team will be contacting selectors along the way, but please send them any questions or concerns.

One other noteworthy change already completed was switching the Database search box on the Library home page to search the A-Z List rather than the ERM. Unfortunately, this is doing PHRASE searching rather than KEYWORD searching. Springshare is working on changing this, and it should be fixed soon.

LibGuides CMS now gives us access to the meta fields in the html. These fields are specifically designed for metadata, including alternate search terms, that you want indexed by search engines. Until now we’ve been using LibGuides tags (that appear on the bottom of the page) to do this, but now we can put them where they belong. (For info on what tags what tags are still used for, see http://guides.library.ucla.edu/bestpractices/subjects#s-lg-box-3586564 )

We've already switched most existing tags to metadata. We'll be contacting individual units about borderline cases, but please send along any questions. To add new metadata, follow the instructions in the Best Practices guide: http://guides.library.ucla.edu/bestpractices/subjects#s-lg-box-5328298

Templates control the basic layout of the guides, including the content of the header and footer and the placement of the page navigation. When creating a new guide, you should always use one of UCLA’s custom templates… they’re easy to spot, since they start with “UCLA”. You basically get to choose between Tab navigation (the old LibGuides 1 look, page links are “tabs” across the top) and Side navigation (page links are in the left column). If you choose Side navigation, you’ll also need to choose options for content columns; Tab navigation allows custom column layouts on each page.

To change the template on an existing guide, choose “Guide Navigation Layout” from the Guide Layout menu (the second icon, looks like a chart). You can learn more about templates in the Best Practices guide: http://guides.library.ucla.edu/bestpractices/layout

Contact the Research Guide Management Team if you have an idea for a new template, whether for routine use or a custom “one-off”. (An example of the latter is the Databases by Subject template, which replaces the regular search box with the databases search box from the A-Z list.)

One of the core differences between LibGuides 1 and 2 is the concept of assets. When you add a Link, a Book from the Catalog, or pretty much any content type other than Rich Text/HTML, you’re not just putting something on your guide… you’re creating an “asset”, a chunk of information that resides in the Asset List and is then “mapped” to your guide, but can potentially be mapped to multiple guides. You can see the full list of Assets under the Content menu. It functions much like the A-Z Database list, but regular accounts can add to it.

Assets are important in a few ways. On the plus side, re-using existing assets (rather than making a copy or re-typing it every time) make it FAR easier to maintain links – edit the asset, and you update all the mappings. Since you can filter the Assets List by owner, it also makes it easy to review all of your links in one place. On the down side, you can ONLY edit an asset from the Assets List or on the original guide it was created in. Finally, if you remove a Link on your page it does NOT delete the asset, even if it’s no longer mapped to any guides.

There’s more info on assets in LibGuides online help: http://support.springshare.com/libguides/managingassets

We currently have 38,000 assets! Every few months I ask Springshare to batch delete all of the assets with 0 mappings. The first time we asked it literally broke the system; they had to write a new script to handle more than 4500 unmapped assets. They’re working on giving this functionality to users.

LibGuides provides detailed statistics on how people are using your guide. Not just total number of visitors, but what pages they’re looking at and what links they’re clicking on. To see those more detailed stats, pull up the general stats for your individual guide, then click on the guide name in the table…

That will bring you to the screen that breaks it down by individual Page Views. Click on Assets to see clicks on Links, Databases, or Books from the Catalog.

Got a handful of links that are getting all the traffic? Help your users find them more quickly by putting them front and center on the home page. Or, if you think they’re being overused, make sure they’re grouped with preferred alternatives.

Got a link that’s not being used? Maybe you can delete it. Or move it to an out-of-the-way box/page. Or maybe you need to highlight it and explain why people should be using it.