Day 1 - Reconsidering LibGuides: From Pathfinders to Learning Opportunities

Springy_Will

Session information: https://training.springshare.com/springycamp/2023/from-pathfinders-to-learning-opportunities

After the University of Houston library restructured, replacing subject librarians with functional specialists, the new Teaching and Learning Department faced the challenge of outdated and inconsistent LibGuides. Previously created by individual liaisons, these guides lacked uniformity and failed to serve their intended purpose, functioning more like pathfinders with few information literacy resources. Teaching and Learning took charge of the LibGuides and prioritized their reconstruction into pedagogical tools, emphasizing information literacy and research concepts. SpringyCamp presenters were tasked with managing this rebuild, aiming to align the LibGuides with department goals and course content, while allowing students to learn at their own pace and identify their needs. Many libraries have been evaluating their online learning materials to enhance effectiveness, and we hope to offer a structured example for attendees to address their students' information literacy needs through research guide assessment.

LibGuide Examples:

• Communication & Mass Media Resources
• Economics Resources

Have any questions for Edward Gloor and Carolina Hernandez?

Post them here! 💬

sthorup

How interesting and affirming to learn about your process! We are currently doing the same here. Can you share your approach to putting your guides into groups and subjects? We are struggling to wrap our brains around it and will appreciate any input and all suggestions. Great talk! 👏

Springy_Meg

Here are some questions from the session: 🤓

1. From Kimberly: Information Literacy skills do have discipline specific specialties. A primary source in History is very different than a primary source for a Marketing class. Were these more aligned with courses?
2. From Shane: Did you need to convince someone to let you dedicate the time needed to refresh your guides?
3. From Shawna: How did you organize your guides into groups and subjects? What was your process? How do you recommend we proceed? 
4. From Femi: How long did you guys take to update all these guides? What was your timeline for updating the guides?  Did your action plan take place in stages? 
5. From Alli: How will you be scheduling the guide reviews? We "have" a review schedule but it hasn't really been able to happen due to staff depatures, lack of time, etc. 

chernandez

@sthorup Are you referring to the Subject and Group categories designated in LibGuides? These had already been previously established and we were good with the preexisting list, so we didn't really do much shaking up there. We did make it so that there's really only three Groups we're working with in our department: Course Guides, Subject Guides, and Co-Curricular Guides. Any other group is not used by us but by other LibGuide users in our Libraries. Hopefully that answers your question!

elgloor

Kimberly:
Our guides are tailored specifically to the subject area. So while we might have a primary source page for our History guide and for our Marketing guide, each page will have information in it that will contextualize a primary source within the subject area. We work with faculty members to ensure we get this right.

Femi:
Guide updates are ongoing. Technically they started in 2020 but we started our focused effort last year. We hope to finish by December. Our documentation was finished last summer and we followed a timeline that we built at the beginning of the year as a part of our yearly goals.

Alli:
Guide reviews happen every semester. We set aside time at a department meeting to give everyone an updated course LibGuide list. We then split those guides evenly among us, and then everyone does the assessment on their assigned guides. For subject guides it works essentially the same way. I think the most important part is to make the updates a priority. Keeping the process straight forward and giving everyone easy to follow steps helps as well.

amartel

Thanks so much, @elgloor! That makes a lot of sense. Rather than scheduling yet another meeting, just tack it onto one that already exists!

~Alli

rughbe

@elgloor I enjoyed the session. How do you work with faculty to be sure you align with the course content when you incorporate learning?

-Betty

ojaye2023

@elgloor and @chernandez! Thanks for your presentation! I'm currently undergoing this EXACT same project and it was so helpful to have your presentation today!

I'm building the action plan and have it planned out in stages over a 2 year period. We are going to do usability testing on some of our guides to our user groups. Did you all consider doing this in your action plan? Hope you don't mind if I reach out to your professional email for advice from time to time.

Thanks again,

Femi

chernandez

@ojaye2023 You're definitely welcome to reach out to us!

We did not include usability testing in our action plan, but I think that's a great idea! We have checked in with faculty, particularly for course guides, to get a sense of any feedback they'd heard from students on the guides, as well as if the students seemed to successfully demonstrate understanding in their course work of the concepts we try to represent in our guides. I think after the initial refresh of all the guides is done, it would be wonderful to incorporate user testing in future update phases.

chernandez

@rughbe If there's already an existing guide, we first ask what is already working from the guide that they definitely want to keep to make sure we don't get rid of anything that's actually working already. We also always ask for a copy of the syllabus and/or information on the major class assignment(s) to better understand what the students are working towards. From there, we work backwards and decide which of our resources will be most helpful in meeting those needs and figure out how we can supplement class learning with information literacy. Before any guide is finalized, we always have the faculty member look over it to ensure that what we've put together works for the class from their perspective. And then at the end of the semester, we like to follow up with questions about how useful the guide was, if there are still things that need to be addressed, and if there was any feedback shared from students.

Springy_Meg

Excellent session, @elgloor and @chernandez! Thanks for sharing how you make the magic happen. On the Springy end, we can produce all of the how-to documentation in the world but we unfortunately can't rejigger everyone's schedules to make guide updates a priority. Well, actually we could go into everyone's LibStaffers and assign everyone to a world-wide "Guide Review" shift… 😏 …but we wouldn't / probably shouldn't. 😆

Thanks again for joining us, and thanks to everyone in this thread for their terrific questions and insight!