This guide provides information on best practices for creating research guides, as well as guidelines for creating and maintaining your guides. These best practices and guidelines are largely user-focused, and their purpose is to make our guides easier for our library patrons to find and use, as well as to ensure that our guides are as accessible as possible.

More information on the basics of creating and maintaining research guides is available by starting fresh with an empty guide.

These are some guiding concepts to keep in mind as you work with research guides.

Consider Your Users

Most of our LibGuides should address the needs of our users, not ourselves. When designing a research guide, think about what our users need to do and how your guide can help them do that.

Make sure your Content is Reliable and Up-to-Date

Libraries are trusted sources of information for our users. We want to make sure that any content we make publicly available is as accurate as possible. This involves a on going and consistent maintenance, as we need to make sure our guides aren't outdated and that our links work.

Make Information Easier to Find

Use short descriptive titles, friendly URLs, and make sure that you've assigned your guide to the right Type and Group. You can also use tags to create keywords for your guides to make them easier to find.

Be Organized and Concise

We want to give our users everything they could possible need, but they are often better served by content that is concise and selective rather than exhaustively thorough. Organize your research guides and pages so users can easily scan and navigate them.

Plan for the Future

Creating and maintaining research guides is a considerable amount of work. Keep in mind that the research guide you create will need to be maintained regularly in the future so be selective about what you choose to create and be intentional in creating content that can be updated as easily as possible.