UL LibGuides

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

Agreed to a common front page for subject guides…

and 4 common tabs to open …

Discipline-specific variation further in …

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

Migration to LibGuides 2

A-Z of databases

• We use to manually update our database details, adding them to an A-Z, subject guides, subject lists.

A-Z of databases

A-Z of databases

Summon & LibGuides

Summon & LibGuides

Final Thoughts on Migration

• LibGuides 2 is easy to update

• Springshare provides very good online support

• Database Assets are a great help

• However default look & feel is limited in terms of customisation, if you do not want to edit the CSS behind the guides