LibGuides Template

Does your library have a LibGuides template? The word template evokes the idea that when making a brand new guide, you would start with that guide. The "template guide" at Joyner Library is not really a template in that sense, but rather a repository of boxes, buttons, and APIs that I keep up to date to share with a team of librarians. Even if you are the sole librarian creating LibGuides at your institution, this could shorten the time it takes to update guides. The great part about this setup is that if something needs to be updated, for instance, a tutorial video, this is simplified. If the librarian who has borrowed the box has mapped their box to the original box in the template, they do not need to do anything. Changes take place in their guide and I do not need to worry about the currency of the video in our 300+ LibGuides. There are many reasons that people may not want to map to the original box. Consider that you cannot make any changes (text, etc.) to the box if you do not make a copy in to your guide. Most of our video tutorial LG boxes do not have text in them, but for other boxes, they may want to edit text. For the most part, people do link to the original box in the template.

So, what is on this guide, you may ask? Here is a breakdown of what I have on the template guide at our institution.

Best Practices

We have adopted a list of best practices for our LibGuides. For the sake of brevity in this post, more information will be included in a future posting, or you can visit the Joyner Library Template Guide. The best practices boil down to naming conventions, when to create a guide, and more.

Tutorial Videos, Guide on the Sides, and "Click-Throughs"

The main reason we have a template guide is to help people find the myriad of tutorial videos, Guide on the Side tutorials and Click-Throughs. Click-Throughs are PowerPoint presentations uploaded into a hosting site like Slideshare. Joyner Library also keeps up a Tutorials page on the website, which is another way for students to find the information, but grouped and formatted differently. 

Citation Guides

During my tenure as the Instructional Design Librarian, I created a Citation Guide for each of the main types of citation we see in assignments. I have created the following citation style guides: APA, MLA, ASA, AMA, CSE, ACS, APSA, and Chicago. Each of these tutorials is an active learning exercise to have students create a citation and locate information to put in the citation. The other things that are included in the guides are links to the actual style guide and Purdue OWL, as well as to citation generators, if they exist for that style. There is also a plagiarism tutorial. I have librarians map the correct tab from the template guide into their LibGuides.

Database List APIs

This may take some explaining, but the information architecture of our database list is basically a database of databases. Within this database, we have a current listing of which subscription library databases we currently subscribe. Our Application and Digital Services department helped create a single line of JQuery code for the LibGuides boxes that makes a call out to that database to tell it what the current library databases we subscribe to are for a subject. I then made boxes for each subject in LibGuides, pasted in the code, edited a small piece of the text for that subject and voila! Every time a user goes to the page, it only shows the library databases we have right now. This means that the RIS librarians do not need to keep track and make sure that the LibGuides are updated when databases are added or removed from the list. Here is what they look like:

Some drawbacks are that there is no way to point out a specific database that you would recommend as a subject specialist, unless you wanted to create another box above or below telling students which databases were best to use. This is not so much of a bother with Criminal Justice, but some of our other subject headings have many database listings.

Search Boxes (Catalog, OneSearch, etc.)

With the help of the ADS team, we have also created search boxes that take the person into a Summon search, catalog search, or Google Scholar search. I do have to check these often to make sure that nothing has broken, since they seem to go offline quite a bit more often than the others.

Career Tab Template

With the focus these days on college campuses about what students will do when they finish, the library has seen a lot of assignments that ask students to choose a topic from their field of study. We got so many questions about how to research things in their chosen career and how to come up with topics that I created a Career tab that I have people copy in to their own guide and customize. This is one place where I am not expecting people to map to the template guide. They do have to customize each page.

Get Help Tab Templates

In our best practices, I encourage people not to show their contact information on every single page. We also have a Get Help tab template that gives the RIS desk numbers and email, as well as a link to the main chat. This way, if people are on vacation or out for a conference, the person asking for help does not wait for a long time to get help. I have also created simple, graphical buttons that the student can click to reach our Writing Center, Tutoring Center, and more. (If you're wondering, I made these with Illustrator, but you could use a free product, if you wish.) Here is an example of this kind of box:

Building Maps

You may ask yourself, why would you include a building map on a website? Many times, LibGuides are used as a supplement to in-person classes. I have included building maps because it was something that I was finding myself linking to often and I could see the building maps being one of those things that may be updated or changed. Feel free to create tabs and boxes on the template guide for the things you find important to your guides!

One complaint I hear about our template guide is that it is so chock-full of stuff, it is sometimes hard to find what the librarians are looking for. It helps to have the graphical interface of the template open on one tab or window and the guide you are making on another.

So, you may be asking, what about an actual "template"? Why not make the guide something to start from when making a new guide? The template guide is, as I have mentioned, more of a repository. The look and feel of new guides is determined by the back-end of LibGuides, which is locked down for editing. Only two librarians at our institution are administrators and we have collaborated to determine the generalities of how the guides should appear. For instance, our tabs are purple and rounded and they appear at the top of the screen instead of down the left side. The box headers are also ECU purple. Everything else is determined by our best practices. At this point, we are more in a maintenance mode of keeping up existing guides, rather than creating lots of new guides.   

If you would like to see the Joyner Library Template guide or borrow anything from it, please feel free to do so.