LibGuides Best Practices

Below are some LibGuides best practices to help guide LibGuide authors.  This list is not exhaustive.  For further guidance, see Springshare's Best Practices Guide.

• When adding a proxied link, do not include “https://ezproxy.valpo.edu/login?url=” at the start of your URL.  If you’ve copied a persistent link that includes that prefix, delete it, and then select Yes next to “Use Proxy?”
  
  
• When adding links to your guides, use the ADD-> Link option.  Do not include links in Rich text/ HTML. Only identified links will be checked by the link checker.
  
  
• Similarly, if you want to add databases, make sure to choose ADD-> Databases. If databases are not added as databases, they’re not counted in our usage stats correctly, and URL/name changes and drops will not affect individually created links. There are still references to Gale Virtual Reference Library (dropped by INSPIRE last year), LexisNexis Academic, American Factfinder, etc. in our LibGuides.  Some of these are due to databases created as individual links, and some are due to correctly used databases with customized descriptions that haven’t been updated.  Please search your guides for these terms.
• For links to books, use the ADD->Book from the catalog option. If you use the ISBN lookup feature (Get Book Info)- it will provide a book cover, if available, and all the publication details.  It often adds too many details (example 1: instead of just year of publication, it will provide year, month, day; example 2: sometimes there are many authors, and it will list them all- you may want to edit for a cleaner looking record).  You can delete any extraneous details before hitting save. If it's a book from the catalog, make sure to add the link to the catalog record (can pull from the URL bar).  If it's an ebook, make sure to use the persistent link and select Yes as the Use Proxy option. Exception- if it's an open access book, the proxy link is not needed.
• If you want to add a link that you know (or think) has already been used in LibGuides, please try the reuse link option.  If there are multiple assets for the same link and the URL changes, each of those assets needs to be individually edited.  By reusing links over and over, it saves time when editing is needed later.
  
  
• If linking to resources in our databases, please see this page for information about persistent URLs and proxied links.
• Every semester, go through your LibGuides and hide class pages that aren't coming in for instruction that semester. If a class hasn't come in for instruction for several years, or if the faculty member is no longer at Valpo, consider deleting the class page.
• Our default page template has three columns.  If you’re only using one or two columns, consider editing the layout for your page to something more appropriate for your content (see screenshot).