ul libguides
TRANSCRIPT
UL’s experience of creating & migrating
LibGuidesAnne McMahon
E-Resources & Web Services Librarian
Glucksman Library, University of Limerick
What we had before LibGuides …
• Old Subject portals Varying in quality & coverage
Only three of four faculties covered
Difficult for faculty Librarians to update
• A separate ‘Faculty Librarians’ page
June 2014Start of Project
• Employed a co-op (work experience) student full-time for 6 months– Law Plus background allowed us to prioritise Arts, Humanities
and Social Sciences guides– An interest in a career in librarianship– The co-op student worked with the 5 faculty librarians on
developing content for LibGuides
• Digital & Technical Services did the back end work – Customised system settings and look & feel – Created an comprehensive A-Z database Guide
Most significant achievement(s)• We now have a guide for every one of our 27 academic departments
• Co-op student worked with each Librarian to input their content
• Every faculty librarian and every faculty engaged in the process
• Our Librarian for Research Services & Bibliometrics created a very comprehensive research guide which is one of our most popular and heavily used Guide
• LibGuides has helped Faculty Librarians improve their online presence
Ongoing• Co-Op student created a manual for our librarians based on her
experiences (she’s now updating the manual for LibGuides 2)
• Working with the Info Services senior library assistant for 2 hours per week to keep continuity and build up in-house expertise
• Other guides in development e.g. Collection Development Policies, Academic Literacies, Information Literacy ….
Outreach to the university …Head of Information Services gave a presentation to the Library Information Resources Development Committee (chaired by VP Research & including faculty and student representatives)
very enthusiastic reception
agreed to help us with a launch and general promotion
Migration to LibGuides 2Reasons for Migrating
•Faculty Librarians wanted to do some more customisation on guides
•You lose some customisation when you migrate – e.g. tab and box colour choices– Custom Header & Footers– Existing Banners
•Made more sense to do the changes in LibGuides 2
Migration to LibGuides 2• Springshare give step by step guidelines• They also provide a detailed online tutorial
A-Z of databases
• We use to manually update our database details, adding them to an A-Z, subject guides, subject lists.