Maintaining your guide is important to make sure users have the most current resources and the best possible LibGuides experience. The following tips will help you manage your guide and make maintenance as easy as possible:
- Reduce time spent updating: Use assets and the reusable boxes feature rather than copy and paste. These features allow you to reuse links, database assets and boxes across several LibGuides, while only having to edit it in one place.
- Use fewer links for less future work. The fewer links in your guide, the less work you’ll have to do to make sure those links still work in a week, month or year. Additionally, if you include a list or table with frequently changing information, your LibGuide will require more regular updates.
- Update your guides and check links often. In one study, a subject team found that 25 percent of links were out-of-date in one printed guide alone after one year. Check your links often and make sure they still work. You can make use of the LibGuides link checker feature to facilitate this process.
- Promptly remove database links to resources to which we no longer subscribe.
- Review active guides annually to see if any new resources are available that can be added to existing guides, if any guides need to be reassigned due to staff changes, and if any inactive guides should be archived or deleted.
