LibGuides Best Practices

Regular tasks for maintaining guides

After creating your guide, it is good practice to set a schedule for updating and reviewing guide content and organization. Here are some tasks we recommend performing on a regular basis to maintain your guides:

• Identify and make necessary edits: Closely review guides to see if any content should be updated, edited, added, or removed.
• Link checking: Check the links on your guide to make sure they are not broken and still lead to the site you intend. Test all links to verify they lead to the correct destination, whether they are assets or embedded in rich-text boxes.
  • For Link Assets: LibGuides has a tool that monitors the links on all LibGuides at: Tools > Link Checker. These are generated automatically, so it may incorrectly identify links as broken or fail to catch links that are actually broken. We recommend using the Link Checker as one tool, but not relying on it along. The easiest way to search for links on your guides in the Link Checker is to search your name in the owner column of the list.
• Update class guides: If you have chosen to create individual guides for classes, check these guides at the start of each quarter to verify the class is being offered, has the same course number, etc. If you find the course guide is no longer needed, it is recommended that you unpublish, make private, or delete the guide (guidance on this decision is below).
• Review assets (if possible): Assets can be difficult to manage, as they are not automatically deleted when you delete the instance from a guide.
  • You can review all your assets by navigating to Content > Assets and filter by your name as owner. You can then sort assets by “Mapping Count” and bulk delete assets that have "0" mappings (that do not appear on any guides).
  • The LibGuides & Databases A-Z Working Group is working on a plan to manage assets as a future project.

Springshare help center

Should you decide to remove your guide from public view, you can either change the guide's status to unpublished or private, or delete your guide. Deleting a guide creates an HTML backup automatically, so the guide will be viewable and downloadable, but not editable.

Changing guide's status

Changing a guide's status limits how a guide can be viewed by the public. To change a guide's status, you can select the drop-down menu next to the indication of the current status in the upper right hand corner of the editing page. From there, you can select Change Status and Share to make the change. Each status described below, followed by a table by Springshare with the status information.

• Unpublished: An unpublished guide is not visible to the public and cannot be found through either a URL or on any public facing site or search. It is still available to be viewed by any user who can access the editable back end side of LibGuides. Unpublished guides are guides that you do not want available to the public, but you may want to use in the future.
• Private: A private guide is only available to users via a direct URL. For example, all of the guides from the LibGuides & Databases A-Z Working Group are private--they do not appear on our Research Guides homepage, but we are able to share direct links to them internally.
  • If you make a guide private, you have the option to redirect the URL of the guide to a different guide--navigate to the settings button in the top right button menu of your guide and choose Redirect URL.
• Published: A published guide has a visible URL, is included on the Research Guides homepage, and can be found using a search engine. All of the guides on the Research Guides homepage have the status of Published.

Deleting a guide

When to delete a guide

It is advised that you delete a guide when you are reasonably certain it is no longer being visited by users. Here are some ways to ascertain use:

• Are the view statistics for the guide low?
• Is the course/topic/program no longer being offered at UCI?

Deleting a guide permanently removes it from the back-end (editing) side of LibGuides, but you will still have access to an HTML (readable but not editable) version of the guide.

How to delete a guide

1. Select Content from the navigation ribbon on the edit side of LibGuides. 
2. Select Guides from the dropdown menu.
3. Locate the guide you would like to delete by searching in the different fields (Note: A regular-level user will only be able to delete a guide they own).
4. Select the X button in the action column. The action column appears furthest to the right on a computer screen.
5. Check I understand that this cannot be undone.
6. Select Delete
7. Automatically upon deletion, a backup of the guide will be created and stored in LibGuides: Tools > Data Exports > Guide HTML