Best Practices for UCL LibGuides

Guidance on maintaining your guide to ensure content it up to date.

• Maintaining your guide - the basics
• Reorder pages, or boxes within a page
• Check for broken links
• Rename a guide
• Set up a redirect for guide or page that is no longer needed
• Change a subject guide owner

• Add editors to a subject guide

For subject guides, please also see our the Top 5 tips for subject guide owners, created by the Subject Guides Sub-committee to help you make essential updates to your guides, and last updated in summer 2022. 

Creating a guide includes a commitment to maintaining it long term. Keeping your guide current helps students and researchers find the information they need. Moreover, they can see when a guide was last updated.

• Review all guides  at least once a term, to see that all resources are up to date.
• Use statistics to see guides' usage to prioritise the most frequently used guides.
• Use the LibGuides link checker to ensure that all links are active. If you have more time, check your links manually. Link checker will not notify you that the link to a resource is out-of-date, if the old link is still working.
• Remove links to resources that we no longer subscribe to.
• Actively monitor and add new content to your guide.
• If a page in your guide is no longer required, set up a redirect rather than deleting the page.
• If a guide is no longer relevant, please do not delete it initially as there may be other links to it elsewhere. Instead, change its status to private and set up a redirect.

To rearrange the order of pages in your guide, or boxes within a page, click on the Page link at the top of any page and select either Pages or Boxes, under Reorder.

You can also reorder assets within a box, by clicking on the Add/Reorder link at the bottom of the relevant box.

LibGuides has a built in link checker to help you identify broken links. We recommend that you check it regularly to see if it includes links within your guides. To access it:

• Click on Tools in the menu bar at the top and select Link Checker
• Type your first or last name in the owner column to identify links that you maintain
• Click on a link to check if it's broken. If it is, click on the edit symbol in the column on the far right to correct the URL. If it isn't broken (e.g. it may just have been unavailable when Springshare last checked it), click on the delete symbol in the Actions column on the left to remove it from the list
• See the Springshare guidance on how to manage broken links for more information

The Link Checker will not detect links which are simply out of date or point to the wrong place. Be aware that if you change any of your guide page URLs, any links in your guide which direct the reader to those pages will also need updating with the new URLs.

When naming a Subject Guide, the title should be succinct whilst also reflecting the content as closely as possible so that users can quickly identify the most relevant guide for their needs. It’s possible that a guide may occasionally need to be renamed to reflect changing academic programmes. 

List the subject(s) covered as the main title. Only use the principal subjects covered by the guide. For example: Business, Management, Entrepreneurship and Finance or Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies.

Any minor subjects can be referenced by the inclusion of the relevant Subject Categories. Contact Lindsay Ure to create any new Subject Categories. Also consider adding a longer description in the ‘Guide Description’. This appears as the first text on the guide and also appears in listings when clicking the (i) icon.

NB. Avoid using acronyms and abbreviations, unless they are officially recognised by UCL e.g. SSEES. Use 'and' instead of '&'.

To rename a guide: 

• Click on the existing guide title to open the edit box.
• Remove the existing title and type the new title into the edit box.
• Click on the blue tick to save your change.

If you have made a substantial change to your guide title you might also need to change the short URL to reflect this but be aware that if you change the URL any links to it will be broken. To change the URL follow the guidance at Friendly URLs. Check links within your guide and inform other guide owners of the change. Initially, you should also set up a redirect.

If you are retiring an entire guide, or a page within a guide, please do not delete the guide or page because this may result in broken links from other sources. Instead, set up a redirect. You can also set up a redirect if you wish to change the friendly URL of a page.

Setting up a redirect for an entire LibGuide:

From the Guide information (cog icon) drop-down menu in the top right of the screen, select Redirect URL, then enter the URL to which you wish to redirect. This may be another LIbGuide or any other web page.

Setting up a redirect for a page:

There are two ways to set up a redirect for a single page:

1. Request a redirect from an Admin user (only possible if the guide already has a friendly URL) 

If you wish a redirect to be created for a page in a subject guide, please contact Lindsay Ure. For a page in a Library Skills guide, contact Angela Young.

Instructions for Admin users:

• From the Admin menu select Metadata & URLs and then the Friendly URLs tab.
• From the Friendly URL drop-down menu select Redirect.
• Enter your old redirect Friendly URL and the new friendly URL Please note, you will not be able to enter the friendly URL from which you wish to add a redirect until it is no longer in use, so you will need to change it on the LibGuide in question or delete that page before applying the redirect. Ensure you have made an accurate record of the URL before you change or delete it.

2. Set up a redirect from a non-friendly URL

Use this method if the page was published without a friendly URL in error, or as a temporary fix pending a proper redirect being set up by an Admin user.

From the page in question, click on the Page dropdown menu and enter the URL for the page to which you wish to redirect. The redirect should work even where the page is hidden. 

If you are setting up a redirect owing to a page being published without a friendly URL, you will need to duplicate the page to create the version with the friendly URL and then you can set up the redirect from the original page and hide the original page.

While there can be multiple guide editors, a subject guide can only have one owner. Only admin account holders can change the owner of an existing guide, so please contact Lindsay Ure to request this. Note: if a subject guide is a collaborative effort between multiple colleagues and you want to have more than one profile box on a page, you can add the profile boxes for additional colleagues separately.

If you'd like to give other staff access to a subject guide to make edits/updates to them on your behalf:

• Check they have a LibGuides account. If not, contact Lindsay Ure to request an editor level account. 
• Once the account has been set up, contact the LCCOS web support team to request that the profile page associated with the account be disabled, so that it does not appear publicly. This is because those with editor level accounts are not able to disable their profile pages and only those with an admin account for LibApps can do this on their behalf.
• Open your guide as if you're going to update it, then click on the Guide Information symbol at the top right and select Guide Editors from the drop down

• Provide them with training on how to update a guide. Guide editors can add, edit or delete any content in your guide so please make sure you review the instructions in the Best Practices guide with them. 

Please note: To add editors to a library skills LibGuide, please contact Angela Young.

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