Comments on: The long road towards subject guide 2.0

By: Kim Griggs

Kim Griggs — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 16:45:50 +0000

We developed a custom solution at OSU Libraries called Interactive Course Assignment Pages (ICAP). Laurie mentions it above, but is incorrect about the Drupal part. ICAP is an open-source project built on Ruby on Rails that will be released next week to the public: http://ica.library.oregonstate.edu/about/index.html

The tool has been widely adopted by our Librarians and as Laurie said the pages are also being used by our students.

By: Edward

Edward — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 21:15:24 +0000

I noticed you updated the usage information about Libdata, but it also looks like they released a new version in 2005. I installed it and used it while at Rider University, and it was a pretty good tool and came with good documentation. A quick check shows that Rider is still using it and they link to various subject guides right from the library home page (http://www.rider.edu/172_6148.htm). I think that is a key to getting students to use them. Without learning about the guides in a Bibliographic Instruction session or other wise, I don’t think many students will click on a link that says “Subject Guides”, but they just might click on one that says “Biology”.

By: Britta, del.icio.us community manager intern

Britta, del.icio.us community manager intern — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:03:33 +0000

I think some of the issues with del.icio.us being a third-party service can be mitigated by exporting your data – with the API, the RSS & JSON feeds, and in standard browser-bookmarks-format – to make a backup copy of your guides on your website. There are also some tools to help you do that, including http://slashlinks.eyebeamresearch.org/home and http://nanovivid.com/projects/mysqlicious/. Anyway, we at del.icio.us love that library people think about and use del.icio.us!

By: susan

susan — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:31:29 +0000

We also found that the subject guides just weren’t matching our students’ needs. My colleague Brenda Reeb and I wrote an article about it in Portal 4.1(2003) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v004/4.1reeb.html

We built a local content management system in order to create course-specific library resource guides. http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=courses Starting this year, these guides are now automatically pulled into the Blackboard shells for each course.

By: Anne-Marie

Anne-Marie — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:54:36 +0000

I’ve read your post with a rueful grin on my face, because I know just what you’re talking about! I’ve been taking a break from fixing my school library website. The district went with a new provider this year, so my URL changed–so all my links for a webquest on Europe now don’t work. So I’m having to fix the links on 26 different pages for my third graders tomorrow. The only webquest I haven’t had to completely rework is the one on my pbwiki.

By: Angela

Angela — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:40:28 +0000

Research Guides demo did not work which worried me but the ones hosted at UMich looked awesome. But like with everything else I worry about resources… will people at my school be interested or are we stretched too thin to try new things.

By: Erica Nicol

Erica Nicol — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:58:32 +0000

Thanks so much for this post! I'm at a large library, and have been fretting over managing (many) subject pages for some time now. We're at a point where ideas of what can or should be on the guides have loosened up so that we can try new things, & I've been playing with some alternatives to our static html pages. It's very helpful to read about what you've been testing/considering, and also makes me feel less alone in the information universe. I expect you've already seen it, but Ellyssa Kroski has a nice post on Creating 2.0 Subject Guides.

By: Craig

Craig — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:30:32 +0000

Two alternatives to check out: DocuWiki (for wiki pages) and CMSimple for content management. These are unique in that they do *not* require any detabase back-end, but instead store the content in flat files on the filesystem. I have done everything from Zope to Drupal and back, but I keep reaching for these because they are so simple to set up and run. Both are free.

By: Ross

Ross — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:19:47 +0000

Meredith, we’re struggling with the very same issue in migrating our museum object guides to the online environment. We originally had the resources on our Intranet site: It was a bear to edit and consequently we stopped looking at it much ourselves except as a quick link to url’s we couldn’t memorize. What’s more, it made no sense to ‘hide’ freely available content on a limited-access resource.

In looking at what was already out there, we didn’t want to replicate those (usually university) subject portals already out there, each with (presumably) a staff to maintain links and add content. But those portals are so bewildering in their comprehensiveness that we still felt we needed to identify ‘key’ resources pertinent to our rather narrow subject focus.

Since our blog couldn’t visually and technically carry the weight of these guides, we moved to wikis. After finding one that seemed reasonable, we were still faced with too many resources to maintain links to realistically. Now we’re looking to keep the top sites on the wiki and send users (”see also”) to the del.icio.us site for the secondary web resources. The del.icio.us site can also be a temporary place for resources under review.

What are people doing to balance the limited-access resources and the free ones? We don’t have a natural captive audience (i.e., students), so apart from a small in-house staff and those using terminals on-site, our links might not be functional for the majority of our wiki/del.icio.us users.

Until every book is Google-ized (unlikely), we still can’t provide web access to all the pertinent resources needed to do research on a museum object.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:28:57 +0000

Thanks for this timely entry. At our small college, we did have many subject guides, but they were very difficult to keep and maintain by the library webmaster (me). In August, I pitched del.icio.us to the director and my co-workers, and within a few days I had all the links transferred from the old subject guide to del.icio.us. Based on the web statistics, the subject guides were little used, and the new del.icio.us subject guide is...little used, but at least can be updated frequently and by more than one person. View our efforts here and here.