Last semester, I met individually with all our liaison librarians to better understand how we are using LibGuides. The good news is that there is remarkable consistency in how we view guides in our work! Here are the common themes I saw:
Common Themes:
Almost all guides have been inherited from others, so not sure what is useful and what is “legacy content.”
Very little input from teaching faculty on the content of the guides. Each liaison indicated a faculty member or two at most would provide input.
Liaisons all felt they lacked the time to assess, maintain, and especially to overhaul the content of their guides.
Guides are seen primarily as an “asynchronous help tool,” “shortcuts to specific subject resources,” or “subject-specific wayfinding” rather than instruction aids or tools.
Taken together, I see these themes in two insights:
At the UL, guides are not instruction tools or faculty collaboration opportunities. They are shortcuts for researchers to get to subject-specific materials all in one place.
We have too much content in our guides. Liaisons do not have the time to maintain their guides, and in many cases are not sure what content is useful or being used. Systems and Discovery (SaD) spends too much time maintaining these guides.
My Recommendations:
Agree that the audience for these guides is primarily students, not faculty. Guides exist to support the Curriculum at GVSU. (Exceptions always exist.)
Scale back the content on guides to manageable levels. We currently have 231 Guides with almost 1,900 pages and 10,000 assets.
Assess the usage of guides and content with statistics. Prune guides to remove unused and unnecessary content.
Develop guidelines (not rules) to encourage and normalize a manageable amount of resources on guides.
Consolidate subject and course guides. For example, Wren created a drop-down menu on the Political Science guide that shows all the one-page course guides. (There are just over 50 course guides.)
Remove out-of-scope or unused guides. (There are 27-30 guides that have not been viewed in over 3 years or that are out of scope.)
Take advantage of LibGuide’s asset mapping features to reduce the amount of duplicate content that needs to be maintained.
Simplify the design of the LibGuides homepage. There is no sense in reducing the overwhelm users feel looking at the guides if we route them through a page with the world’s longest list of links.
Create a workflow to ensure consistency between the recommended databases on the A-Z list and the databases recommended on the subject guides. Liaisons can assign databases to Best Bets or any subject - I just want to make sure we have consistency between guides and the A-Z list.
This summer, SaD’s Web Squad will be available to work with each liaison to make a plan for their guides. We will then do the updating and formatting of guides for them!