I would be interested to share experiences relating to subject guide development. My questions include:
Do undergraduate/graduate students find these digital presentations useful? Faculty? How do they use these guides? At what stage(s) in their research is the guide helpful? Do people in local communities use subject guides provided by the local public library?
Maybe LibGuides / subject guides are as much a tool for the librarian as they are for the student, i.e. note-taking, a way of self-education around an academic discipline? I’ve heard that hard-copy reference materials are more for the benefit of the librarians than for the students — is this really true?! If so, maybe web-based subject guides have similar use.
In terms of reference, I would think it’s important to tailor information to one’s user base, but the subject guide exercise also feels somewhat like re-inventing the wheel. Surely other institutions have excellent guides that my students could make use of.
I’m aware that institutions have internal guides for their subject guides, i.e. best practices, uniformity of look-and-feel, usability, etc.
Has anyone effectively used analytics to facilitate development? i.e. which links do users click into, how much time do users spend on a page, etc.
#1 by Miriam Posner on February 27, 2011 - 4:50 pm
I think this is a really good idea. Speaking from the point of view of a researcher, I’ve often thought that there might be better ways to arrange subject guides. In a former life, I worked on this research guide at the Museum of the Moving Image: www.movingimagesource.us/research. I’d be very glad to talk about how we went about this, if that would be useful to others.
#2 by rebecca.oling on February 28, 2011 - 10:32 pm
This seems timely. We just moved to LibGuides in the past few months. In doing so, we looked at the structure of many of the guides out there and opted for ones that were simpler (one set of tabs across the top), but we don’t yet know how usable they are. You can see our new guides under Research By Subject on our webpage at www.purchase.edu/library
#3 by Brian Croxall on March 1, 2011 - 9:26 pm
In my short time working on Emory’s LibGuides, I feel like we could really do more to create a uniformity in our guides. (If it were up to me, I would limit us to using just two columns of boxes per page.) But you’re right that much of what librarians write on these guides could be duplicated. Perhaps we need to be lobbying libraries to make more of their reference material like LibGuides Creative Commons licensed? Then again, it’s helped me better learn our collections to create a subject guide. And since I don’t actually think many students use them (a hunch–I’ve got no data), then making a new one ex nihilo might be the best approach after all.