Maintenance
Come up with a maintenance cycle that works for you! The recommended cycle is:
- check course guides every semester
- check topic, subject, and general guides annually
If guides are reassigned to you after staffing changes, please review them as soon as you are able.
Other considerations during your maintenance:
- Consider how many guides you can reasonably manage.
- Check your page statistics
- When checking links, see if you've duplicated a link, and use the more common link (for example, until recently, there were nearly 100 individual assets/links that just led to the homepage)
- Make sure your links are still valid. Install the Check My Links extension for your browser (there is a new version, you may have to uninstall and reinstall it if using Chrome).
- Go to the guide page you want to check links for and run the extension (go to the button in your browser toolbar).
- Valid links are highlighted in green. Invalid links highlighted in red.
- Update links on the guide.
- Updates and changes to content
- Database/asset changes
- Design and format (Don't use all caps, asterisks, or other formatting "tricks" in titles, remember to default to sentence casing)
- Accessibility
Please feel free to ask for help with these steps.
Retirement
Questions for consideration:
- What type of guide is it? If a course guide, are you teaching it again? Is it a copy of a subject guide or very similar to it? (Consider: what does this provide that my subject guide doesn’t?)
- What is the usage? Was/is there a communication plan?
- Is this information duplicated anywhere?
- Does the website link to your guide?
Life Cycle of a LibGuide
Phase 1: Evaluation
- What guides exist?
- What guides need to be created?
Phase 2: Drafting and Publishing
- What needs are not currently being met?
- What new partnerships have been formed for which a guide would be useful?
Phase 3: Maintenance
- Check your guides for outdated content and broken links
- Evaluate the accessibility of your guides
Phase 4: Retirement
- When is it time to unpublish your guides?
- When is it time to delete unpublished or obsolete guides?
Unpublishing guides
Unpublishing means the public cannot access your guide. Unpublish a course guide when it is not being offered, but it is being taught again. Unpublish any guide that you plan to make significant changes to.
Deleting guides
As a Lead, I reserve the right to review guides and contact guide owners with questions. I will never delete a guide without your express permission. Please review your unpublished guides annually. I find it is helpful to have one "sandbox" guide if you want to experiment with LibGuides functionality and/or track your own reusable boxes, links, and images. I am happy to delete your guides or transfer their ownership. Here are some reasons that you may want to delete a guide:
- Duplicate guides
- Course guides that won't be offered again
- Guides that aren't being used
- Guides that are outdated and not worth editing