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Day 1 - Baking Resource Accessibility and Branding into Your LibGuides with a Custom Blueprint Guide

Springy_Will
Springy_Will Member, Administrator, Moderator, Springy, SpringyCamp Counselor admin
edited March 25 in SpringyCamp archive

Session information: https://training.springshare.com/springycamp/2023/accessibility-and-branding-libguides

The University of Georgia Law Library revamped its LibGuides site using Springshare tools and institutional branding resources. This presentation outlines the steps taken, from research guide inventories to rolling out the library's first blueprint guide. It covers archiving older guides, troubleshooting customized CSS, and utilizing subjects and keywords to enhance topical and patron-specific pages. Strategies for promoting electronic resources and measuring increased accessibility will also be shared.

Have any questions for Rachel Evans?

Post them here! 💬

Comments

  • Springy_Meg
    Springy_Meg Member, Administrator, Moderator, Springy, SpringyCamp Counselor admin

    Here are some questions from the session: 🤓

    1. From Heather: Do you have some standards around tagging and assigning subjects? 
    2. From Alli: How successful are you at having staff use the blueprint guide when creating new guides? We have one but struggle at folks actually using it. 
    3. From Katy: Why did you choose Side Nav? Is it considered more accessible?
    4. From Maria: How do you archive guides? In a separate group?

  • rsevans203
    rsevans203 Member Lab Coat

    Thanks Heather! To answer: Do you have some standards around tagging and assigning subjects? We do! We now encourage librarians to use existing subjects / tags rather than creating totally new ones. New ones need to be shared first with our law library multi-department instruction team for informal approval. We want to ensure at least a few guides can share the new tag so that hopefully we do not have a ton of subjects/tags that only apply to 1 guide.

  • rsevans203
    rsevans203 Member Lab Coat

    Thanks Alli! To answer: How successful are you at having staff use the blueprint guide when
    creating new guides? We have one but struggle at folks actually using it. 

    Alli, we also struggled getting folks to use the blueprint. It has taken 2 years to get librarians to adopt it more frequently. Luckily LibGuides notifies me as Blueprint Guide Owner and site admin each time the Blueprint Guide is re-used in any way by email!! This has been a great way to internally praise librarians who follow the procedure or use a best practice style box. I turn around and forward that email to the other librarians or the entire library listserv - this encourages the librarian who used the Blueprint to keep doing awesome work!! And also shows/reinforces the existence of the Blueprint to encourage others to follow the example and do it themselves. Getting library staff to embrace libguides versus librarians to has been tricky. We hope to do some more training in the coming year as a refresher - reminding folks about the Blueprint and also showing them how simple it can be to use it!

  • rsevans203
    rsevans203 Member Lab Coat

    Thanks Katy! To answer: Why did you choose Side Nav? Is it considered more accessible?

    Short answer is YES it is WAY more accessible across devices. We did a usability test a couple years ago on our catalog, libguides and discovery layer and learned a lot through that experience combined with the device types our big user groups have (Google Analytics helped us to gather the device and browser data!). As a web developer myself I also used some browser-based tools to view our libguides across various device types and browsers to see exactly what end-users see for tabs across the top versus side-nav.

    Both Salt Lake Community College and Washington State Libraries have public-facing best practices for LibGuides that shares even more information on the improved accessibility and usability of Side-nav style.

    https://libguides.slcc.edu/Accessibility/SideNavigation

    https://libguides.libraries.wsu.edu/bestpractices/layout

  • rsevans203
    rsevans203 Member Lab Coat

    Thanks Maria! To answer: How do you archive guides? In a separate group?

    For us, we decided to preserve the look & feel in addition to the content by downloading PDF's of guides we wanted to archive. Screenshots are OK for look and feel, but PDFs can capture that along with retaining text-searchable content and in most cases the URLs of resources too.

    We use this same method for other online and print materials we want to make digitally accessible even after they are sunsetted in our archives. We store most items in our Institutional Repository (Digital Commons). For items we do not need to make publicly available but might want to refer to for content in the future, we store those archived PDFs on an internal shared drive.

    Essentially you "print" the guide you want to archive, and select to "save to PDF". Next you can choose to double check links are still functional and text is searchable (if not using Adobe Acrobat Pro can help with OCR-ing and checking accessibility). We also use a naming convention for these files to make locating archived PDFs of old libguides possible should we ever need it.

    Lastly, we feel confident that we can delete those guides that are obsolete and archived!

    Here is a shared document link to the documentation I created for our student workers to "archive" old guides: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aJaKk7FKK1Tq6UMa1O0av1HAAhxMJ_uAKxPVLJb2EaU/edit?usp=sharing

  • rsevans203
    rsevans203 Member Lab Coat

    Here is a document version in case google docs is tricky:

  • rsevans203
    rsevans203 Member Lab Coat

    And last but not least - the training link for learning how and why you should create your own Blueprint Guide for your library! https://training.springshare.com/libguides/blueprint-guides

  • Cybrarian
    Cybrarian Member Springy Pro

    @rsevans203 Can we copy your Blueprint guide? "steal" really. 😃

  • amartel
    amartel Member Springy Champ

    Thanks, @rsevans203! It brings me joy when someone uses our template, and I hope that my scolding urging will one day pay off, too!

    ~Alli

  • Springy_Meg
    Springy_Meg Member, Administrator, Moderator, Springy, SpringyCamp Counselor admin

    Awesome session, @rsevans203 / Rachel! Thanks so much for sharing your workflow and the links about side-nav usability and accessibility. 🙂

  • katyp
    katyp Member Lab Coat

    Thank you!