A presentation titled “Establishing a Peer Review Process to Evaluate Research Guides” by Heather Brown from the McGoogan Library of Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center during MLA ’17 discussed her institution’s experience with streamlining their LibGuides. She and her colleagues created a set of standards to which all guide creators must adhere, and formed a peer review committee to evaluate proposals for LibGuides. This ensured that all LibGuides coming out of the library were consistent and relevant.

I am personally a huge fan of LibGuides; I think they’re a convenient way to disseminate information to your entire user base, as well as easy to update and maintain. I have created a few myself over the last year or so, including a comprehensive LibGuide for the new College of Medicine at my institution. This talk started me thinking about best practices for LibGuides, and what other types of LibGuides I should be creating for the students and faculty at the new medical school.

After some digging through the literature, I found a few useful tips for creating and managing LibGuides:

• Make your guides accessible to users at the point of need, i.e. on the course management system (Gonzalez & Westbrock, 2010)
• Create an assessment plan to ensure your guides are relevant to your users (Gonzalez & Westbrock, 2010)
• When naming a guide, use action-oriented “trigger words”, i.e. “Getting Started with Research”, “Finding Evidence” (Reeb & Gibbons, 2004)
• Consider breaking large topics into smaller subtopics to avoid overwhelming users with information (Quintel, 2016)

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus Health Sciences Library has a thorough and practical series of checklists for creating LibGuides:  http://hslibraryguides.ucdenver.edu/bestpractices 

References

Gonzalez, A.C., & Westbrock, T. (2010). Reaching out with LibGuides: Establishing a working set of best practices. Journal of Library Administration, 50, 638-656.

Reeb, B., & Gibbons, S. (2004). Students, librarians, and subject guides: Improving a poor rate of return. Libraries and the Academy, 4(1), 123-232.

Quintel, D.F. (2016, January). LibGuides and usability: What our users want. Computers in Libraries. Retrieved from http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=e1603fc2-f4cd-4db5-b675-055e042b4be5%40sessionmgr120