Guide to Research Guides: Policies

LibGuides Working Group:  Allan Berry, Amelia Brunskill, Emily Johnson, Anna Kozlowska, and Rebecca Raszewski.

Please contact us if you need help with the following:

• Need LibGuides accounts created or deleted 
• Need help with reassigning LibGuides to other users
• Questions regarding editing LibGuides

More support:

• See user forums on the Springshare Lounge and support blog
• Check out guides from other institutions on the Community site

Style guidelines for the Research Guides template are established by the LibGuides Working Group in cooperation with the Discovery Services Advisory Group (DSAG). Changes made to the code of individual research guides may be reversed by the LibGuides Working Group to ensure consistency between individual research guides and the overall style of the Web site.

Users who leave UIC will have their subject guides reassigned to new subject specialists.  Course guides and special topic guides will be deleted unless ownership is transferred to a new user before the original user departs.  Profile guides will be deleted at the time the individual's employment at UIC is complete.

1. Consider the different elements of your guide: databases, reference, books, E-books, related online resources (important websites, blogs), etc.
2. Less is More. Select your resources based on relevance and quality. Don't overwhelm users with many variations of basically the same thing. 
3. When it comes to electronic resources, focus on fee not free. Incorporate free resources when useful, but a single LibGuide cannot duplicate the vast array of free resources on the Web.
4. Begin building your guide. You may want to use an existing guide as a template. You may re-use guides created by UIC librarians or re-use a guide made available from ANY of the librarian authors in the Libguide community. For example, perhaps UC San Diego has a particularly well designed  page on kinesiology resources. You may copy and re-use it, provided you change the content to reflect what is available to UIC users.  Also you should ask the original guide user for permission to copy their guide as they will be notified that a copy was made.  
5. Group resources together by pages and boxes. Many guides at UIC designate "Article Databases" as the main page of the guide, and add additional pages for items such as Books, Clinical Tools, etc...
6. Once you've completed your guide, create a "friendly" URL for your guide, change status to "private" and share the URL with other librarians for feedback.
7. Make changes to your guide as needed.
8. Change status to "published".
9. Don't forget to add tags to the published guide! These allow users to search for LibGuides by keyword either through Web search engines or the UIC Library site. When creating tags, use an underscore for phrases such as "health_sciences".

Check for broken links at least twice a year.

When you are logged into your LibGuides account, go to the Tools button at the top of the screen.

Click on the Link Checker. It will give you a list of links that may be down on your guides. Please note: Links entered thru the rich text editor are not checked. The Link Checker can only check links that are added within the following box types:

•     Web Links
•     Links & Lists
•     Dates & Events
•     RSS Feeds & Podcasts
•     Books
•     User Submits
•     Polls