| Metadata | |
|---|---|
| Guide type and group assigned | |
| Guide subjects and tags assigned | |
| Friendly URL assigned for guide and each page | |
| Course metadata requested for Canvas integration |
Tags
Add tags to your Research Guide so that users find it when they search or browse in guide lists. Think of tags as potential search terms/phrases: use spaces and natural capitalization. Use descriptive and ample tagging. Tag course guides with the tag “course guide”, in addition to relevant course topics.
Subjects
Assign subjects to your course guides. Do not add a subject to Topics guides.
Typically you should not assign subjects to your guide that do not fall within your liaison areas. The review team realizes that not all guide authors are subject librarians, and exceptions will be made for those guide authors. However, if you are a subject librarian, please do not assign your colleagues’ subjects to your guides without their express permission.
For General Education courses, assign the subject “Gen Ed Courses”
To add new subjects to the subject list, contact a member of the LibGuides Review Team.
Friendly URL
Before publishing your guide, click the edit icon next to your guide URL and enter a friendly URL for every page of your guide
Note that this is for the Springshare search feature, not other search engines like Google. The Springshare search feature is also used as the source for the "Research Guides" results in Library Search.
· Review term frequency – This is from the support representative at Springshare: “In general, the frequency of the term within a guide's content, including asset content, pushes its results higher in the relevance list.” Keep this in mind when creating your guide description and content.
· Think strategically about your guide tags – Guide tags are factored into the search results. When creating your guide tags, consider specific terms that might help to improve discoverability. For example, you may want to add common synonyms for your guide’s subject or other related terms that might not be in the page content of the guide (ex. adding a “pedagogy” tag to an Education guide).
Example - The tag “printmaking” is included in the Art guide, which does not mention the term otherwise. Because of this inclusion, the Art guide pages show up in the search results.
· Add assets with robust descriptions – Any text that you include in your asset description is picked up in the search and will potentially improve a guide’s rankings in the Springshare search. Even when the asset description's display is hidden in a guide, it's still part of the metadata indexed in the search.
Example - This only produces search results because of matches found in the description text of embedded assets in the page, such as Teaching Modernist Women's Writing in English (asset 73293195).”
