Best Practices for UCL LibGuides

1. Break up text
2. Make the most of reusable content and link to other guides
3. Check for broken links
4. Get feedback from others
5. Check for accessibility

Feedback from the recent staff and student surveys on subject guides revealed that people find it easier to navigate and understand content when there is a good balance between text, images, and videos or other multimedia content.

Over the next year, the Subject Guides Subcommittee will review reusable content that we created as part of the subject guide template, and is mapped to all subject guides.

However, for content that is unique to your guide, try adding some visual interest with images, break up longer text into smaller boxes, and make good use of headings and sub-headings to help people quickly navigate your guide.

How to find and add images to your guide

How to add boxes to your guide

There are also lots of visual elements and videos available in the Reusable content guide.

Browse the Reusable content guide for items you can add to your guide.

There are two reusable content boxes we recommend in particular this year:

• A new Inclusive Collections box is now available to add to your guide. Relevant to all subject areas, this box informs people about our approach to inclusive library collections, with links to more information. Instructions on how to access this, and other items in the reusable content guide are available in the Best Practice guide.
• The UCL East Library virtual tour - if there are UCL East programmes in the relevant subject area.

You can also link to other skills and subject guides. For example, the Black Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies guides are interdisciplinary in nature, highlighting underrepresented voices in our collections - consider whether it may be helpful to link to these guides from your subject guide.

If you have suggestions for relevant new resources to include in these guides from your subject area(s), make them via the Gender and Sexuality Studies guide form to be considered for that guide (until 28th August 2025), or send them to Liz Lawes for consideration for the Black Studies guide.

Use the link checker to give you a list of links on your guide which you can then click on to check they load correctly.

Bonus tip: To focus just on links in your guides, search for your name in the ‘owner’ column on the link checker page.

When considering changes to your guide, it’s a good idea to run the draft past a colleague to get some feedback from another point of view. They can help with proofreading, give a fresh perspective on how readable and engaging the guide is, and help pick up on any accessibility issues.

Before publishing changes to your guide, work through the quick Accessibility checklist.

If you’re just editing existing content on your guide, there is no need for it to be formally reviewed, these changes will happen automatically.

Only new pages, new content boxes, or entirely new guides need to be submitted for review.