LibGuide Maintenance: Set Up

When creating a new guide...

1. Name your guide.
2. Give a short description of what a user will find in your guide (like data/tips/resources on subject/event/person) or use it as a hook to pull a user in.
3. Choose your guide type:
   • General Purpose: Doesn't really fit into a category.
   • Course Guide: Is for a class.
   • Subject Guide: Is for a broader subject, like a major or minor.
   • Topic Guide: Is for a specific topic within a subject.
   • Internal Guide: Only for Gumberg LibGuide users' eyes (like this one!)
   • Testing, Scripts, Files...: For testing, scripts, files... (self-explanatory.)
4. Assign your guide to a group. 
5. If it's an internal guide that you want to be accessible to those outside of LibGuides (many Library Staff members do not have access to LibGuides), set the guide type as "general purpose" (internal guides will not appear on the Guides to Research page), choose the internal documentation group, and set a password. The most common password here is "library."
6. Allow the entire LibGuides community to reuse our guides!

Make your guide discoverable and accessible!

All guides as discoverable by keyword searching, but you can assign subjects and tags to help users find them.

Subjects: Our pre-determined subject categories, like English and Social Justice. (Tip: Only put it into General/Multidisciplinary if it really fits there. If it's multidisciplinary, assign it to more than one subject, instead!)

Tags: Can be anything! Tag important topics or events that don't come up often or are not explicitly stated in your guide. (For example, you may have a guide on the Pope that never says the word religion, but you still want the guide to come up if someone searches for "religion"!)

Create friendly URLs for your guide and each of its pages. Click the pencil next to URL to change what comes after the .edu. For each page, click the pencil after PAGE URL. This makes your guide easier to access by memory. If you need to insert a link to the Theology guide in an email, it's easier to type in http://guides.library.duq.edu/theology than to have to look it up!

Unpublished: Not viewable to anyone other than LibGuides users within Gumberg. 

Private: Viewable to anyone who has the link. If it's still linked to somewhere OR if a user has the friendly URL memorized, they will still be able to access this guide. This may not be bad - it may even be intentional - but just remember to keep this guide up-to-date.

Published: Viewable to anyone through the links on the Guides to Research page. Can be arranged into subjects, types, and groups or found through keyword or A-Z searching.

Familiarize yourself with Gumberg's guides to see if there are any boxes or assets (links, books, videos, databases, etc.) that you can reuse on your guide, rather than creating repeated content in the system. That way, if anything changes, we'll only have to update the box or asset once to see the change in multiple locations.