Library Guides:

Kim Vassiliadis, Head, User ExperienceUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Content Creation to Content Management

A Little History • Late 1990s:

o begin creating guides

• Early 2000s: o Database to track and make the guides more findable.

• Mid-2000s: o Coursepages pulled into Blackboard (now Sakai)o Subject guides were everywhere

By 2011...

350 subject guides

UNC planned to move to LibGuides

Libguides

LibGuides are "Easy"

• Technical knowledge isn't necessary

• Create and update pages quickly via a browser

• Hosted externally

• Easily sharable content

• Responsive tech support

Herding our CatsHow do we sustain them?Are they being used?

Guides are like Kittens

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marleysmama/2930198345/

Management is Hard

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marleysmama/2930198345/

Consider the guide lifecycle

Infancy

Middle Age

Old Age

Undead

http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1273/4662811565_9c55eb11af.jpg

Why this is bad

• Website goal: Users view the Libraries as reliable

• It's easy to just ignore out-of-date content.

• If our content is wrong or inaccurate, our users lose faith.

Didn't want to move our old guides to a new CMS

Move to LibGuides

What did we do?

• Defined purpose

• Consistent style (look and feel)

• Planned life cycle

• Long term commitment

Management Plan

• Make a commitment

• Weigh their time commitment against the use of the guide

• Use consistent content and style

Subject Librarian Goals

• Defined a subject guide

• Identified all the subject guides in our system

• Deleted inactive and outdated guides

Phase One: Zombie Guides

http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1273/4662811565_9c55eb11af.jpg

Phase Two: Care and Feeding

• Created usage reports for active guides

• Created a policy for updating active guides

• Created a workflow for deleting guides

• 20 minutes to review each page in the guide

• 3 minutes to look at each individual resource

• 7 minutes to add a new resource

• 15 minutes to update a broken link

Analyzing a Guide

Usage Report

Analyzing a Guide

Analyzing a Guide

Phase Three: Now and the Future

• Completed migration to Libguides

• Yearly Usage Report

• Tighter controls over what it means to be "up-to-date"

There are now 89 Subject Guides

Current Status

We don't want all these guides

Going Forward

We want guides that our staff feel good about and our patrons can love.Questions?