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CofC LibApps Best Practices: Subject Guides

Guidelines for keeping LibGuides, LibCal, and LibAnswers content fresh.

Email from August 2020

It is time to get our subject guides in shape for fall. This group of guides needs the most work to be updated following migration, due to the large number of Classic Catalog and e-journal links on most of these guides. Because it requires so much work to overhaul these guides, we’ve decided to move forward with a new, simplified subject guide template at the same time.

You can find the new model for our subject guide here: https://libguides.library.cofc.edu/subjectguide_MODEL Huge thanks to Elena Rodriguez for doing most of the legwork on this new model and accompanying template!

This guide is based on our review of the literature and a few real-world library examples, and it follows a more pedagogical format than our current subject guides. We hope this will be useful as an in-class teaching tool, as well--possibly reducing the need to make a course guide every time.

If you have not already unpublished existing subject guides, please do so now. If you have a need to see the public view of an old guide as you work on the new guide, you could make the older guide Private until the new one is finished, then unpublish it.

We are not redoing ALL subject guides. In the past, we have tried to have a subject guide for all CofC majors and minors. However, these programs fluctuate faster than we can keep up and actively manage so many guides. Additionally, there is often some overlap, making this level of granularity somewhat redundant. After some discussion in the spring, we did some analysis of which Subject Guides a) match to the College majors/minors with the largest enrollments, and b) have the most views. We came up with a list of most-needed subject guides based on this analysis. This list is a starting place. If you know of a subject guide that will be missed by faculty and/or students and you believe it belongs on this list, please redo that guide along with this. If you notice overlap between two guides and think they could be combined, that is also reasonable. Please email me with any additions/changes so I can reflect them on the master list.

Instructions for making new subject guides and a list of “kept” subjects are available in this Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lrJLZIVjswqAu78nshL9IZTqzI8Ut3Cw2buCTDTmVXA/edit?usp=sharing

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