Best Practices and Accessibility

Purpose

Before you start creating a guide, take a few moments to think about these things:

• What is the purpose of the guide?
  • What information needs to be conveyed? 
  • Is this a teaching guide, a place to list and describe resources, or for other information?
  • Does the information already exist elsewhere?
• Who is the primary audience? How will they use the guide? 
• How will the guide fit in with existing library guides and web pages?

Keep others informed

Use Teams or email to let other librarians know that you are working on a guide on a specific topic. Collaborate if possible. Avoid duplication. 

Choose a creation method

• Use a template
• Create from an existing guide
• Create from scratch

We use a standardized template for Research Guides. [Soon to be revised]. By using the template, you have the flexibility of adding, deleting, and revising sections of the guide while maintaining a common structure. Some of the boxes are mapped, so any updates to these boxes in the template will be reflected on all guides that use them. Creating from scratch gives you the most flexibility, but you can also copy an existing guide and edit from there.

Whichever method you use, consider reusing content by copying or mapping. Mapping helps to cut down on duplicates and eases updating across multiple guides. Copying a box, link, or other asset will allow you to edit your copy, but it is no long connected to the original for updating. 

Add content

Follow the best practices guidelines to ensure that your guide is readable, accessible, and meets STLCC standards. 

Publish

• Ask a colleague or two to look over your guide and make suggestions before publishing. Tip: set the guide status to Private and share the link.
• Use the Publishing Checklist.
• Assign the appropriate Group, Type, and Subject for your guide. 

Updating is everyone's responsibility.

• Fix bad links and typos as you find them.
• If you find outdated information that you cannot easily update, notify someone. You can send a message to the guide owner or to the systems librarian, or post it in Teams. 

Keep your own guides up to date.

Regularly review any guides that you have written or been assigned to update. This goes beyond broken links! 

• Refresh highlighted resources with more current ones.
• Simplify wording.
• Reduce cognitive load by using less text, "chunking," and avoiding duplication. 
• Check accessibility.