CofC LibApps Best Practices: Guide Content and Links

Purpose: To make guides that are easy-to-read and to navigate. Before starting a guide, have a clear vision of its purpose and a strong understanding of who the intended audience is.

When drafting content for a guide, be sure to follow writing for the web principles:

• be concise, clear, and to-the-point. 
• put the most important and compelling information at or very near the beginning.
• use common terminology (avoid tech speak and librarian-ese).
• be consistent, especially with colors and style. This applies to links as well.
• avoid underlining text as this may cause it to be confused for a link.

Consult the Guide Design and Appearance page for more tips.

When adding content to guides remember that for some content (urls, books from Primo, documents, etc.) Assets are preferred over Rich Text. There are a few reasons why:

Assets Library

Link Assets are maintained in an assets library so links can be used again in other guides. Update a shared link in one guide and the change is updated across all guides that have used the link.

Statistical Information

Link Assets provide statistical information. They keep track of the number of times they have been clicked throughout the guides which may provide data about how often guides are being used.

Link Checker

LibGuides' Link Checker only checks Link Assets, so if a link is broken it can easily be detected.

Databases

Follow these instructions from Springshare for adding databases to your Guides:

Guides: add a database from your A-Z List to a guide

Primo Records

Add the permalink to the full record of a article, journal, or book. Permalinks are located under Tools menu in Primo Records. In a list of items generated by a search in Primo, Permalinks are located in the top right of the short record, indicated by the linking icon.

Text Links

Text links added to guides should make semantic sense. Use deliberate link text and avoid language and characters that are not easily recognized by screen readers. 

You can save significant time and effort by reusing guide content, a practice which is strongly encouraged. In addition to reusing specific database and link assets, reusing other type of content is encouraged. You can reuse boxes and even entire pages from other guides.

There are two ways to reuse content:

• Mapping: the reused versions are connected to the original. Changes to the original will make changes to the mapped versions.
• Copying: independent from the original so changes will not display in the original. 

Boxes

The Reusable boxes page of this guide contains boxes that can be mapped into your guides. To reuse boxes in your guides follow these steps:

1. Click an Add Box in the column for which you would like to add a box.
2. Select Reuse an Existing Box.
3. Select the Guide and Box you wish to reuse.

Page

To copy and reuse a page from one guide to your own, follow the steps on this page from Springshare:

Copy or reuse a page

Bootstrap Cards

Sometimes mapping entire pages from other guides can be confusing to users. Additionally, many users ignore the page tabs across the top and only see content on the first page. Instead of mapping many additional pages to your guide, you may want to consider a Bootstrap card to add an eye-catching link for another guide. You can reuse (map) an existing Bootstrap card or create a new one. The Common Bootstrap Cards page contains steps for both mapping or creating a new ones.