Tag: LibGuides

Lessons Learned from Auditing 100 LibGuides

Last fall, my library undertook an ambitious—and necessary—overhaul of our LibGuide catalog. This was spurred on by the new requirements added to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 2024, which requires publicly-funded entities (such as universities) to ensure our digital content is accessible. However, before we could begin accessibility remediations, we needed to audit our LibGuide catalog to understand what we were working with. A couple weeks after starting as the new social sciences liaison, I was tasked with auditing the nearly 100 LibGuides in my subject areas and deciding which ones to remediate—and which ones to scrap. 

When I began this project, I felt totally lost. I had to quickly figure out the faculty and student stakeholders, pedagogical context, intended purpose, and actual users of each guide. I also wanted to be respectful to my predecessor, who had put so much hard work into creating and maintaining these guides. And I had some emotional hangups about deleting guides. When I saw a guide with only 15 visits a semester, I imagined those visits as one dogged student who had lovingly bookmarked the guide years ago and still returned every week. I didn’t want any patrons to feel ambushed by the loss of a favorite resource. Still, it was becoming clear that the number of guides I had inherited was no longer sustainable to maintain. 

The audit took about three months, and it was at times invigorating (Yes! I figured out how to organize the history guides!) and at other times grueling (Dear Lord, how many more are there?). Today, I want to share some of the lessons I learned from going through a major LibGuide weed as a new librarian. 

First of all: It’s okay to delete LibGuides.

The first time I gave the okay to take a guide down, I had visions of my inbox filling with emails from irate students and faculty demanding my resignation for destroying essential library resources. But that didn’t happen.

Yellowstone didn’t erupt, campus wasn’t struck by a tornado, and I wasn’t mobbed by angry patrons on my way to the staff lounge. And if you take down an old LibGuide, I can (almost) promise you won’t be either. 

This is partly because:

Delete/keep is not a binary. 

During the audit, we identified many guides that fell into a grey area between “permanent deletion” and “keeping public.” We used a variety of strategies to address these cases. 

Strategy #1. Quite a few course guides were used little enough to raise a yellow flag, but not so little that I felt comfortable permanently deleting them—especially because I hadn’t yet built relationships with the faculty who’d requested they be created in the first place. Additionally, I expected course-specific guides would have less use than general-purpose guides, even when active. In many of these cases, we decided to set the guide to private (if it wasn’t already). Then, we’d hide all guide content except the Home page, which we changed to display this message: “This guide is currently unavailable. Don’t worry—we’re still here to help! If you were using this guide for a class or need research support on this topic, please reach out to us at library@uni.edu.” This removed the need for us to remediate these guides, since we only need to remediate materials available to the public. With all the content hidden, the public can’t see it. But I can still access, restore, and remediate these guides on a case-by-case basis if a professor reaches out. 

Strategy #2. Some guides featured well-curated, high-quality content that was no longer relevant to our patrons. For example, I was faced with the decision of whether to delete several wonderful guides associated with courses no longer on offer. In these cases, I unpublished the guide. When a guide is unpublished, I can see it and patrons can’t. That means I can reference the resources my predecessor collected (and republish the guide if the course is offered again in the future!), but since patrons can’t see it, we don’t need to worry about Title II remediation right now. 

Strategy #3. Our guide catalog was a little bloated when we began the audit, so many of our guides contained overlapping content. For example, we had three guides for undergraduate primary source research. In these cases, we would choose one guide to overhaul, consolidate all the most important material onto it, and set the other guides to redirect to it. If anyone had saved links to the extraneous guides, they would be seamlessly sent to the newly-overhauled one. 

Strategy #4. For any guides we did decide to delete, we used a phased approach. Guides will be unpublished first. Then, after six months, they will be permanently deleted. This buffer period helps mitigate the chance of permanently deleting a resource that’s regularly being used by a patron. 

We also added new guides.  

This may sound counterintuitive. But even though we aimed to reduce the overall size of our LibGuide catalog, we also kept an eye out for needs that were not being addressed. The name of the game wasn’t “reduction,” it was “precision.” For example, by looking comprehensively at all our offerings, I realized the criminology program did not have a general-purpose research guide, so we created one. However, as I’ve discussed above, we also consolidated, unpublished, or deleted quite a few guides. Each guide should be evaluated in the context of our other offerings and our patrons’ needs. 

One more time: It’s okay to delete LibGuides. Even popular ones.  

There was a handful of popular guides I agonized over for a long time. They weren’t attached to any particular department; they were general-purpose AI and media literacy guides. But they were absolutely massive, and much of their content was already out of date even though they’d been updated fairly recently. I knew I did not have the capacity to continuously update these complex guides on fast-moving current events.

By talking to my colleagues and analyzing our usage statistics, I determined that no librarians were regularly using these for information literacy instruction, and the vast majority of traffic came from outside the university community (via Google searches). As a public university, we have a duty to serve Iowans beyond the boundaries of campus. But my colleagues pointed out that if I got too bogged down maintaining these resources, it could take me away from helping students and faculty. As much as I wish I could clone myself and help everybody, it’s just not possible. 

In the end, we decided to either delete or unpublish all the guides in this particular set. The library continues to provide support on these topics through more sustainable means, like e-resources, workshops, and credit-bearing courses (including the one I’m teaching next month). 

Overall, this project has shifted my LibGuide approach from “just in case” to “just in time,” similar to how many of us are adjusting our collection development models to account for dwindling resources. I realized that the vast majority of my LibGuides were created “just in time,” in response to a direct faculty request. But as campus needs shift over time, a guide that was once created “just in time” might now be hanging on “just in case.” I need to regularly evaluate my guides to prune those that are no longer serving the campus community and create space for new guides to flourish. 

Many thanks to Claire Bowling, our Instructional Design Specialist, who spearheaded this project, implemented all the accessibility edits, and answered my endless questions. 

Building Community through Inclusive Research Guides  

Editor’s Note: Please join us in welcoming Nery Alcivar-Estrella, Reference and Instruction Librarian at California State University, Northridge, as a new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger for the 2023-2024 year here at ACRLog.

As a first year Academic Librarian, I have become immersed in a project at Cal State University, Northridge (CSUN) with Lisa Cheby, the Education Librarian, and Yi Ding, the Online Instruction Coordinator & Director of Affordable Learning Solutions. We have embarked on a CSU-wide effort inspired by the LibGuides Open Review Discussion Sessions also known as the LORDS Project, which was originally created by Cal Poly. My team and I use rubrics and frameworks from the CSU Wide Toolkit provided by the LORDS team at Cal Poly. Our own version, entitled Engaging Diverse Voices through Research & Resources, will help students research the perspectives of marginalized communities. It will provide students with jumping-off points like search strategies, databases, theoretical and methodological frameworks, community resources as well as reading recommendations to help them diversify their research. Students researching one or more forms of oppression, whether that’s sexism, racism, ableism, ageism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, religious persecution, or linguistic discrimination would benefit greatly from using our LibGuide. The tabs located on the right side of the LibGuide have been organized by communities or identities that have been systemically excluded by academic institutions.

As a community of librarians and scholars, we must challenge traditional research practices and encourage critical reflection, particularly as it relates to referencing methods. Typically, academic librarians work with professors and instructors, who require students to cite scholarly or peer reviewed journal articles. Subsequently, many academic librarians have established a conventional way of approaching information literacy and research instruction. However, we must not oversee the importance of recognizing and uplifting different forms of authority. Because of institutionalized discrimination and systemic oppression within predominantly White, research-intensive institutions, publishing processes must be critically examined. As noted in the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, “Experts understand the need to determine the validity of the information created by different authorities and to acknowledge biases that privilege some sources of authority over others, especially in terms of others’ worldviews, gender, sexual orientation, and cultural orientations.” In this way, academic librarians may help students identify not only traditional authorities like peer-reviewed journal articles, but also alternative sources of information like blogs or podcasts. Our LibGuide, Engaging Diverse Voices through Research & Resources, will raise awareness about inclusive academic processes and citational justice.

In our LibGuide, Lisa Cheby will cover the section about citational justice and she will discuss its current role in research and scholarship. She asks, “How are we decentering, decolonizing, diversifying research practices?” With these questions in mind, we developed our LibGuide with the intention of fostering and supporting campus-wide discussions about inclusive research practices. We hope that our suggested readings and tools about citational justice will encourage educators and students from various disciplines to implement this practice into their own scholarship. Citational justice involves a critical awareness about who we are citing and why. Rather than just locating bibliographic information, citational justice involves a commitment to diverse perspectives and schools of thought. This includes questioning our own biases, learning about the identities of cited scholars, and embracing marginalized voices into our scholarly conversations.

As I begin my career as a Reference & Instruction Librarian, I have come to recognize the importance of digital learning objects. Since more students are becoming distant or hybrid learners, it is critical to provide various points of access, which includes online resources centered on inclusive research practices. Although our CSUN LibGuide will not be officially published until spring 2024, I will share our work-in-progress. Please feel free to explore our work and consider implementing a similar research guide at your own college or university.