web site guidelines

[Michelle Miller Shutt]

Please forgive the cross-posting!    

Like most other public library websites, our site includes a page of links that we feel are good sources of information.  We try to evaluate the sites before adding them to our page as we don't want the page to become too large and unwieldy (you can see it at http://www.richland.lib.sc.us/links.htm if you're interested).  We add maybe three or four sites per month, at the most.  We are starting to get requests from people in the community to add their homepage(s) to our list.  We are hesitant about this for a number of reasons, including the fact that the links page WILL get large and unwieldy as well as the fact that the purpose of the page is not to be a directory of local links (there are other local web sites that do a great job of acting as local directories http://midnet.libsci.sc.edu/ for instance). Before we can start to say "no, we can't add your link" we want to write up some guidelines that we can fall back on. My question (finally!) is this.  Do any of you have written guidelines about what types of links you add to your web site?  If so, would you be willing to share those guidelines?  You can reply to me off-list and I'll summarize if there are enough responses (and if there's interest)

Thanks.
_________________________________________________________________________
Michelle C. Miller Shutt
Technology Support Librarian
Richland County Public Library
1431 Assembly Street,
 Columbia, South Carolina 29201
(803) 929-3445
mmshutt at richland.lib.sc.us 
http://www.richland.lib.sc.us