Campus Guides Policies

[Steven Turner]

Hi Lisa,

At the University of Alabama, we were concerned with the same trend, which
reached an apex about 4 years ago, prompting the creation of a very
specific polcies and guidelines document, detailing what could and could
not be placed into a libguide as content - essentially we decided that the
content had to support a class, or general departmental subject area, and
we removed the content that did not match these criteria and placed it back
into the website.

Fast-forward 4 years, and we have gone through a massive redesign of the
website, with a renewed focus on the website as a tool for resource
exposure and library information. All 'intellectual' content has been moved
to either wordpress blogs or into libguides 2.0, creating a distinct
separation between website content (resources, research, library info),
libguides content (class and subject support), and blog usage (kitchen
sink, news, personal, etc.). We also stipulated very specific design rules
based on our own usability research, and the available literature - we do
not feel that design and navigation have anything to do with intellectual
freedom, and are furthermore of such importance in terms of providing the
user with a consistent experience that we really needed to specify
navigation, layout and what a page should consist of in terms elements,
blocks, etc.

We do have a single librarian who manages and admins libguides, and that is
very helpful when it comes to compliance and interaction with the rest of
the librarians for compliance and enforcing standards / best practices.

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 11:27 AM, Haitz, Lisa (haitzlm) <
haitzlm at ucmail.uc.edu> wrote:

> De-cloaking to ask the collective a question.
>
>
>
> We have many, many Springshare Campus Guides: about 676! Our guides live
> at : http://guides.libraries.uc.edu/.
>
>
>
> We just migrated to Version 2 this summer. However, many of our folks are
> starting to put more and more content on “guides” that we feel don’t belong
> on a guide, but should reside on our main website. (
> http://libraries.uc.edu/). The concern is inconsistent navigation (from
> the main website, but also from one guide to another), incorrect
> information (url’s not updated, etc…), and just plain lousy layout.
>
>
>
> So- as we begin this holy war discussion ( there is discussion here as to
> whether the web group (which sets policies and standards for the web SITE),
> should even be able to set standards on our Guides pages as some feel it is
> interfering with their faculty right of “freedom of speech”. Others use
> their guides as ‘publishing’ for tenure requirements and feel no one should
> be telling them how to present the info.) I wonder-:
>
>
>
> Do you have policies/standards covering campus guides? Are these different
> than the rest of your web content? Is there a separate group?
>
>
>
> Any examples of guidelines or standards, as well as words of wisdom would
> be appreciated
>
>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>
>
>
> Re-cloaking
>
>
>
> Lisa Haitz
>
> *Web Developer*
>
> *Interim- Chair- Web Management Group*
>
> *University of Cincinnati Libraries*
>
> .
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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>
> 2015-10-06
>

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2015-10-08
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