I am still doing research for my project and have been searching for articles and books, reading, doing copious amounts of highlighting and taking notes. I found another fantastic book on engineering resources yesterday: 'Using the engineering literature / edited by Bonnie A. Osif' http://cat.lib.rmit.edu.au/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=580271 which was published in 2006, and have been taking notes from that today.
During the week I read an article while on the train: Tchangalova, N., & Feigley, A. (2008). Subject Guides: Putting a New Spin on an Old Concept. Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, 9(3), http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/tchangalova_n01.html. In one section it explains how some libraries have used databases to construct subject guides. The database holds information on specific resources, and then web pages can be created dynamically based on parameters that the user selects. This presents a way to create guides that are customised to users' specific needs. Another approach mentioned uses Server Side Includes to combine multiple HTML or text files, that contain information on individual resources, into a single library subject guide Web page.
While I will not be able to use these exact techniques in LibGuides, these approaches got me thinking about the importance of creating guides that are easy to maintain and keep up-to-date. The database or Server Side Include approaches allow the guide editor to have a single place where they edit the information on a particular resource, i.e. either in the database or in a text or HTML file that can then be used in multiple guides. So far when I have been creating guides I have just been writing (or hard-coding) all the text and links into LibGuides boxes. But this means that if one of the links or the text has an error or becomes out of date I will have to fix the problem in multiple places.
After doing a bit of investigating, I think there are a couple of LibGuides features that can help with this problem. When you use a 'Links & Lists' or 'Web Links' box to create a list of links, you can choose to reuse an existing link from another LibGuide. This means that you can create and edit the links in a single guide and then use them in lots of other guides. See this LibGuides FAQ page: http://libguidesfaq.com/a.php?qid=2476 and help page: http://help.springshare.com/content.php?pid=101296&sid=761160 for more information. A similar feature allows you to copy boxes from other LibGuides and choose a 'link' option, so that any changes made to the original box are reflected in the copies: http://libguidesfaq.com/a.php?qid=2651. I now plan to create a master or template engineering guide containing all the links and boxes that contain content that I want to use across multiple engineering LibGuides, so that I can edit the content in a single place.
I also noticed when reading this article: Yang, S. Q. (2009). Subject guide 2.0: a dream or reality? Journal of Library and Information Science, 35(1), pp. 90-98. Retrieved from http://140.122.104.2/ojs/index.php/jlis/article/view/528/522 that it mentioned that LibGuides had a link checking feature (see: http://support.springshare.com/2008/09/25/link-checker-function-in-libguides/)! I had not noticed this before, but am very excited by it as I hate finding dead links on websites. You can click a link in your 'My Admin' area and it will show you a report of the broken links for your guides or for all the guides created at your institution. The report is updated every two weeks. One drawback is that it only checks the links in certain types of boxes: Web Links, Links & Lists, Dates & Events, RSS Feeds, Podcasts, Books, User Submits, and Polls. Therefore I think it will be important to use these types of boxes whenever possible when I create links.
I have been using LibGuides since last year and thought I knew a lot about them, but these discoveries have made me realise that I need to carefully check the LibGuides documentation, FAQ and help websites so that I don't miss out on some of the powerful features available.
In other news my supervisor approved by 'Project Design & Charter' document yesterday!
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