Best Practices for LibGuides at UCLA

Link Checker Gets Major Overhaul

Springshare released a major update to LibGuides last month. The biggest change you’ll notice is to the Link Checker. Some new features:

• Instead of running once a week on Saturdays, the link checker now runs every 30 minutes. However, it prioritizes pages that get visited more often, so links on rarely visited pages may run less frequently.
• You can now edit the link directly from the Link Checker.
• In addition, you have two new actions:
  • Dismiss = Removes the link from the Broken Link report and it won’t be checked for 7 days. Use Dismiss when the broken link was a temporary “false positive”. (Common reasons for false positives are given on the page.)
  • Add to Exclusions List = Removes the link from the Broken Link report and it will never be checked again. Use Exclude when a site keeps popping up in the report, indicating a permanent or recurring false positive.
• LibGuides admins can add entire domains to the exclusion list. Because the link checker is running so much more often, certain sites are getting checked so often that they’re blocking the checker, creating false positives for many links. I’ve added the following domains to the exclusion list, which removed over 7000 links!
  • http://catalog.library.ucla.edu/
  • http://uclibs.org/
  • http://openurl.cdlib.org/
  • http://ucelinks.cdlib.org/
  • http://infoweb.newsbank.com/
  • http://scholar.google.com/

Please look at the new Link Checker when you get a chance and review your broken links. I would recommend sticking with Dismiss rather than Exclude until you’ve established a definite pattern of recurrence. Remember that with shared assets if you add a URL to the exclusion list, you’re adding it for everyone who links to that site. That’s good if it saves everyone from constantly dismissing false positives, but bad if it means we fail to catch a real positive if that link goes down. If you’re finding a lot of false positives on one domain, let one of the admins know rather than excluding them all one by one.