Our users are best served with high-quality, concise content that focuses their attention on the key resources and service information they need to succeed in their research. Users include students, as well as instructors, faculty, librarians or desk staff that need a straightforward approach to getting a student started on their research project.
These standards put into practice lessons from usability testing conducted at Temple University Libraries and research of librarians at other institutions. Our aim is to develop a set of research guides that are coherent as a whole and serve as examples of best practice for getting our users on the path to research success.
These standards will help guide authors save time creating guides, providing standardized requirements for the content and layout of each guide, based on user testing and best practices in the field of user experience design.
Who should use these standards?: Everyone who works at Temple Libraries and creates guides! The Law Library and Health Sciences, among others, are exempt from the review process, but encouraged to use them.
Guides that fall under the purview of the Standards are reviewed periodically. Guides that do not meet the Standards and are not updated as requested could be subject to unpublishing or deletion.
The Standards may be updated periodically to reflect current research and best practices in designing for users. We thank our colleagues at the University of Washington and Boston College who have given us permission to borrow from their work. In addition, we welcome your suggestions for continuing to improve this living document.
Questions about the Standards and guide review process: Review Team (Sarah Jones, Jill Luedke, Adam Shambaugh, Becca Fulop)
Technical help with LibGuides: Review Team
LibGuide/Springhare account creation: Olivia Costello
LibGuides is meant for the management of content relating to research and instruction at Temple University Libraries. We refer to our guides as “Research Guides.” This guide refers to individual Research Guides as “guides” and pages/tabs within the guide as “pages.” The main types of guides at Temple University Libraries are:
Subject Guides: These guides focus on subjects related to specific departments/programs or cross-departmental disciplines and should be created by the appropriate subject librarian(s). They should serve as a starting point on a topic, introducing library users to search tools, databases/journals, reference works, and other resources in their field.
Course Guides: These guides provide information and resources for specific courses to help students with specific exercises or class assignments. They are often created in collaboration with course faculty or instructors.
Topic Guides: In addition to subject and course guides, authors may create guides related to general topics or research concepts. Topic guides are more interdisciplinary and may not fit neatly into one specific subject area.
Topic guides should address broad topics, concepts or tools in research and should not be solely related to the use or navigation of specific systems at Temple University Libraries.
All guides should have a clear purpose and should be concise and manageable over time. Prior to developing any guide, prospective authors should ask themselves:
Is there a need?
Who is the audience for this guide?
What function will this guide serve?
Is the content new and not duplicated elsewhere in LibGuides?
Who is the most appropriate person for authoring the guide? In most cases, the most suitable author will be the subject specialist in that content area. Consider creating and editing a guide with other subject specialists if it is something that reaches across a number of subjects or is very general.
Does the content fall within the specified scope for guides, or should the content reside elsewhere (LibAnswers or another system)?
Does the subject/topic have suitable scale and level of permanent interest?
