I don't talk about my work much on this blog. For one thing, I have to be cognizant of keeping various "company secrets" confidential, and sometimes it's hard for me to determine how confidential something must remain. So I keep mum about everything just to be sure. But I would like to break the code of silence to discuss a project that I've been working on that's been six months in the making. Nothing mentioned here would compromise confidentiality, and this has been a major part of my workload (and subsequently stress) this month.
The trade school that I work as librarian at is one of several sharing the same name that are located across the nation. The project I've been involved in is to create an online resource for students and faculty that will be available at all the campuses. There are only two of us working on it: myself, and another librarian that oversees resources for all the campuses. The interface that we're using is LibGuides, a system that many libraries use in order to create guides for their patrons. It is used by public, academic, and other types of libraries. I was actually called on to help create a complex LibGuide resource for an online university prior to this project, and I used LibGuides to create a pathfinder for one of my MLIS classes--so I am very familiar with creating and editing pages and content. For the resource in this current project, we will be providing some general resources (dictionaries, encyclopedias, research/writing guides, etc.), student success resources, career resources, and resources that are directly related to and discuss concepts that are part of the various academic programs that the schools provide. For the most part, all of the resources we chose to include had to be freely accessible with no login or passwords required. The only exceptions to this were the online databases that the schools subscribe to; landing pages and overviews for the databases were created to provide students with easy access.
I've looked at many other LibGuides, and they run the gamut from sparsely populated and out-of-date to complex and well-maintained. For the most part, I see very little dynamic content on LibGuides; to me, it seems that the general attitude is one of "create it and forget it." This seems like it would be short-sighted; having dynamic content that changes would encourage users to keep coming back to see what's new. With the LibGuide that we've created, we made it a priority to include things like RSS feeds, embedded YouTube channels, and Twitter and Facebook feeds (where appropriate). By doing so, we hope to spark student and faculty interest in the content and see users returning multiple times.
Once again, the needs of the user became one of the forefront concerns when determining what content to include and how to organize it. In the LibGuide that I helped to create for the online university, we included a number of resources for college-level General Education subjects because those courses were offered by the university. For this current LibGuide project, we're not including anything like that because the campuses do not offer those types of courses (however we are including high-school level General Education resources since several campuses offer GED prep help). We also didn't include as much on research and writing as we did in the online university LibGuide because the trade school students don't do an excessive amount of either for their programs. I gathered input from students at the campus where I work so that we could also include resources that would interest them. The LibGuide is being created to be used, and we want to utilize all possible outlets to make that happen.
This month has been spent adding a lot of content and finalizing the overall organization of the LibGuide. Finally, we will see the fruits of our labor and the LibGuide will be going live within the next few weeks. If I can share the actual guide here, I will post a link when it's available.
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