LibGuides Best Practices

Usability study reports:

• Grand Valley State
• University of Michigan and final report
• MIT
• University of Washington final report
• Minimal survey at Georgia Tech
• Latrobe extensive report on Health Science Guides

Research articles:

• Cognitive Load Theory and Library Research Guides. Internet Reference Services Quarterly (2010).
• Guiding Design: Exposing Librarian and Student Mental Models of Research Guides. portal: Libraries and the Academy (2012).
• Letting Students Take the Lead: A User-Centered Approach to Evaluating Subject Guides, Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (2010).
• LibGuides in Political Science: Improving Student Access, Research, and Information Literacy, Journal of Information Literacy (2010).
• Library Use of Web-based Research Guides, Information Technology and Libraries (2011).
• Marketing Research Guides: An Online Experiment with LibGuides, Journal of Library Administration (2010).
• New Library, New Librarian, New Student: Using LibGuides to Reach the Virtual Student, Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning (2011).
• Reaching Out with LibGuides: Establishing a Working Set of Best Practices, Journal of Library Administration (2010).
• Subject Guides in Academic Libraries: A User-Centered Study of Uses and Perceptions, The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science (2011).
• Testing the Usability of Two Online Research Guides. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of LIbrary and Information Practice and Research (2010).
• Web Subject Guides: Virtual Connections accross the University Community, Journal of Library Administration (2010).

From the LibGuides support page on Accessibility:

• "Make sure you add ALT tags on your images, giving a short explanation of the image you're adding. You can do this by filling out the Image Description field on the Insert/edit Image screen.
• Use of iframes: frames in webpages can create accessibility issues. Please check out WebAIM's page on Creating Accessible Frames if you plan on including iframes in your guides.
• Copying & pasting content from outside sources can sometimes be problematic. If you use the remove formatting function (explained in the GuideFAQ), it will help remove some of the potentially problematic code. It might not get everything, but it will help.
• Use the WAVE tool, which was specifically designed for testing web documents for accessibility. Check out our page on the WAVE Tool in this guide."

LibGuides directs screenreaders to an accessible version of the page.  To preview what that would look like, see the "print this guide" link.