We are at the point where many LibGuides are almost ready to be linked to our subject page replacing the old subject guides. We would like to get as many guides as possible live on libguides before 23rd Feb. To get your guide ready for this process, do the following:
1. Publish your guide
Go to: Status – Change Guide Status
Add the course code to the Friendly URL – if there isn’t an obvious course code consult Library IT
Select the subject category from the list provided and click the Associate Tab. Repeat process if you want to add your guide to more than one subject category. We have tried to shorten the list of subject categories because of space display issues on the libguides home-page. However, open for discussion – send suggestions to Janette
Change the status to Published visible to everyone
2. Add a description
Go to Guide settings – Change Title/Description
Type a brief description which will appear at the top of your guide and in the index
e.g. This guide is to assist international students who are studying English language at UC
3. Add tags
Go to Guide settings – Add or Edit Tags.
Add the course code and guide name, also names of topic guides or other synonyms
e.g. American Studies uses tags – amst, american_studies, american_literature, united_states etc.
For phrases use underscore eg. stable_isotopes. Use lower case
4. Click on any Tabs with drop down menus. You need to be in Preview.
Click on the blue tab itself not any of the drop down options.
A home-page should have been automatically created at the point of publication for every tab where there are drop down options if this page has not been set up with anything else.
If there is content on the page that you don’t want, simply delete the boxes and a home-page will be created. If unsure check with Library IT or a colleague.
5. Check profile images
If these are fuzzy, ask Library IT to resize.
6. Proofread everything and check every link
7. Notify Library IT that your guide is ready to be linked. Library IT need to know the name of the Guide, the friendly URL and the current subject guide it is replacing. If it’s not a current guide
Alison J, Catherine, Deborah or Janette are happy to assist with these steps.
Note: we are keeping the existing subject guide home-page until all subject guides have been converted to libguide format. Then the subject guides home-page on libguides can be fully implemented.
Note that if two guides share a tag, that tag displays more prominently on the page (see eg Engineering at the moment). So for more visibility, design your tags so that other librarians can share them (and reuse appropriate tags that other librarians have created).
Deborah
Re: Tags
I don’t get the point of the underscores. Surely they are counter intuitive? I can’t imagine anyone looking for "Medical_Physics" but I can imagine them looking for "Medical" or "Physics". If the tags are too precise it just seems to create a tag specific to that guide. If we use them more generically then it is going to group them if they are related – e.g. I would expect to find any guides to do with Literature (any language) under a "Literature" tag. Searching won’t do this as it turns up any guide with "literature" anywhere in the guide e.g. scientific literature. Any ideas on this?
I think that tying the tags together can be important for visually browsing guides by tags. If you look at the current list of popular tags – some of these wouldn’t work if they weren’t tied together with an underscore. For example, would everyone expect to find "communication disorders" by clicking on "communication"?
I agree about them being too specific for searching, though – it’s not producing the results you’d expect within a tag search (it’s okay if you’re just doing a general search of the text). Perhaps everyone should be encouraged to only add phrases in addition to the separate words (e.g. medical_physics medical physics)?
Donna
I think if I clicked on "communication" i would expect to find any guides relating to communication in any way – e.g. anything to do with information and communication technology, mass communication AND communication disorders. Or at least I think if I clicked on the tag "communication" I would have thought I then got a list back to choose from.
I agree that some underscores are useful but many are too specific and in those cases duplicating doesn’t help — it just makes the list so long students never see most of it.
I think that *where possible*, separate words should be used *instead* of phrases. So instead of "country country_literature country_language country_culture" it could just be tagged "country literature language culture". This would make sure that "literature" etc was as prominent as "engineering" is. Similarly "X_history",
"X_economics", and almost every X_sciences, X_studies, X_engineering (a few like "civil" or "earth" might be borderline but actually I’m with Adam on "communication").
I also think that course codes are by-and-large redundant. "musi music music_scores" and "chem chemical chemistry" etc just clutters the page. "No course codes" shouldn’t be a hard and fast rule — eg I suspect "esol" would be better than "english_as_a_second_language" (I think "esol english language" would cover all the bases) though the subject librarian will know best — but "No redundancy" wouldn’t be a bad one.
Deborah
I’d hope that the list of popular tags is configured to display only the most common tags, in which case the number of total tags added doesn’t really matter (as long as there aren’t too many on a single page).
I also think course codes are useful because the tag search (http://canterbury.libguides…) is very specific – if you didn’t use "chem" as a tag, then it wouldn’t find the Chemistry guide. Also, I’ve just discovered that the main LibGuides search doesn’t actually check for tags (!!) – only guide names and box content. This being the case, I think that visually tying terms together with an underscore is even more useful than treating them as separate search terms.
I am still trying to figure what underscores add. If you have the separate words the user will get there anyway only in steps. At the moment even with 48 guides published we have tags that relate to only one guide appearing in the most popular tags. This seems pointless to me. I would have thought tags were intended to be more generic than more specific and search was for the more specific. With regards to the course code tags I would have thought it was more important for course code to be searchable from the Library home page for a starter?
Actually at the moment if your guide is tagged with anything beginning letters A-E it seems to get on to the "More Popular" tags listing