NYU Libraries LibGuides Style Manual

Each guide owner is responsible for regularly checking their guide(s), making needed edits, and deleting obsolete guides.

Once a month:

• Run Link Checker (located under "Tools" in the top orange header bar) and fix any broken links.

Springshare help: Link Checker: Manage broken links in your guides

Once a semester:

To be sure your guides are in prime shape for fall semester, it's important to do a full round of maintenance on them over the summer. And to keep them fresh for spring semester, it's a good idea to do another full round of maintenance over J-term. Here's what to look out for:

• Defunct class guides: If you have a course guide for a class that's no longer being offered, change its status to "Unpublished" or "Private," or you might decide to delete it. (Changing guide's status to private can still be accessed with the guide URL, but may affect it's linking to courses in the Learning Management System).
• Low-use guides: Review usage statistics for each of your guides. If you have a no-or-low-use guide, consider whether the visibility and content of can be improved, then make the necessary changes. Otherwise, it might be time to delete it.
• Accessibility elements: Check/amend naming conventions, guide type, guide subject, and friendly URLs. 
• Identify and make necessary edits: Closely review guides to see if any content should be updated, edited, added, or removed.
  • When pertinent, reuse boxes, pages, or links from your colleagues' guides.
  • Check assets. (Under "Content" in the top orange bar)
    • Delete duplicates.
    • Consolidate assets by mapping the links/documents/etc. on guides to the same asset.
    • Delete unused assets. (TIP: When you sort assets by “mapping count” you can quickly limit to those that are in zero guides, meaning they can safely be deleted.)
    • Ensure names, descriptions, and links are correct.
  • Ensure that databases are linked from the A-Z Database List (under "Content" in the top orange bar).
    • Remove database links to resources we no longer subscribe to.
  • Physically click on all links -- whether they are assets or embedded in rich-text boxes -- to make sure that they still work and reach the correct site. Fix any broken and/or incorrect links. (Note: Link-checker will only flag asset links that are broken, but not those that go to the wrong site. Unfortunately, there have been instances in LibGuides where a link that had been working fine somehow started going to a different site. Also, even if a link is going to the correct site, have a look to see that the content on that site is still relevant to your purposes.)

Guide Synergies or Duplications

As you review your guides and consider their place within the larger NYU Libraries guides ecosystem, you might come across one of these scenarios:

• There are separate guides for topics that might be better covered together (for example a Citing Sources Guide and a Plagiarism Guide): If you are the owner of one of the guides, you might approach the other owner about combining the two. If you decide to combine, here are some suggestions:
  • Check the usage stats for both guides. It probably makes sense to keep the higher-use guide and port content over from the other guide.
  • Once you port the information from the lower-use guide, don't delete it
  • assign a redirect to the low-use guide for a time, in case users have it bookmarked.
• There are two guides with the same name (for example, a Biology Guide for NYU-NY and Biology Guide for NYU-Abu Dhabi): Think about one working with other guide author to combine into one guide?

LibGuides has a statistics function that can:

• Provide the number of:
  •  views for a guide
  •  views for each page of a guide, and the referring URLs for the page
  •  clicks on an asset within a guide (pertains to link, document, book, and database assets only)
• Provide an inventory of all your content

To access the statistics function:

• Go to the LibGuides homepage (https://nyu.libapps.com/libguides/).
• In the orange bar at the top of the page, click the "Statistics" link.

Springshare help: Statistics: Content Summary

Guide Views

To run a report on the number of views a guide received:

1. Go to the LibGuides homepage
2. In the orange bar at the top of the page, click "Statistics."
3. Use the "All Guides" dropdown to select the guide you want to review. You'll see guides listed within categories, in this order:
   1. Groups
   2. Guides I Created
   3. Guides I Co-Own/Edit
   4. All Guides
4. Choose whether you want a "Daily" or "Monthly" report, specify a date range, and click the "Run Report" button. The resulting report has a graph followed by a table showing the number of guide views for the selected time period. 

Springshare help: Statistics: Guides

Page Views

To run a report on the number of views each page of the guide received:

1. Complete the steps for running a "Guide Views" report
2. On the resulting report, click on the title of the guide in the table, under the graph.
3. Click the "Run Report" button.

• This results in a table listing each page and the number of views.
• If you want to check the referring URLs for each page, you can click on the the "graph" icon next to the total for the page.
• Statistics: Assets

Asset Views

To run a report on the number of clicks an asset received:

1. Go to the LibGuides homepage
2. In the orange bar at the top of the page, click "Statistics."
3. Click the "Assets" tab
4. Type in the name of the asset, then choose it from the drop-down menu.
5. Choose whether you want a "Daily" or "Monthly" report, specify a date range, and click the "Run Report" button. The resulting report has a graph followed by a table showing the number of clicks for the selected time period. 

If you'd like to run a comprehensive report on the number of clicks for all assets in the LibGuides system, follow the same steps as above, except for step 2, where you would select the "All Assets" button rather than specify a specific asset. In the resulting report, you can filter to a specific type of asset (i.e. link, document, book, or database).

Springshare help: Statistics: Assets

When you decide to delete a guide, it's worthwhile to consider these questions:

• Do you suspect that a significant number of users have bookmarked the guide, and is there another guide (yours or a colleague's) that can fulfill a similar purpose for the user?
• Will you be porting some of the content to another of your guides?

In either of these cases, you might want to request that the Libraries' UX department create a redirect to the alternate URL or you can do it yourself.

Springshare help: Redirect a guide or page to a different URL

To delete a guide:

1. On the orange bar at the top of the LibGuides homepage, use the "Content" drop-down and choose "Guides."
2. This results in a list of all of the NYU LibGuides. At the top of the list, in the search box labeled "Owner" type your name to filter to just your guides.
3. Click the "X" that corresponds with the guide you want to delete.

If you needed to transfer ownership of your guides (for instance if your job responsibilities have changed or you are leaving NYU) you would follow the same steps as above except for step 3, click the "Person" icon and select a new owner from the drop-down list.

Springshare help: Edit, delete, or reassign ownership of your guides