LibGuides: LibGuides 2.0 Toolkit (NPU): Creating a Guide

Key Terms

Guide: a mini-website on a topic. They are divided into five types:

Subject - research guides designed to provide guidance on resources relevant to a specific academic subject (e.g. Psychology, History, English, Chemical & Biological Engineering, etc)
Course - guides designed to support the teaching and research needs of a specific course, often created at the request of the instructor
Topic - guides that pull together information on a central topi, tool, or research area that is not generally considered to be an academic department or program
General Purpose - guides that provide general information on a collection or service at the library; how-to guides are also considered general purpose
Internal - guides made to be shared and used by staff at NUL. These guides do not show up on the library's website and may only be viewed when logged in to your LibGuides account

Pages: pages or tabs provide the structure for your guide.

Boxes: contain the content you want to share. There are four types: general, tabbed, gallery, and user profile

Content Items: AKA assets, these are the smallest piece of your libguide and include text, links, databases, books, videos, widgets, RSS feeds, polls, etc

STEP 1: From LibGuides Dashboard, select "Create Guide"

STEP 2: Fill out the three essential items on the form.

STEP 3: Click the little pencils to assign a friendly URL to the guide. Add a subject and tags so users can easily find it.

STEP 4: The default title of your first page is "Getting Started." To assign your own title, click the "Page" dropdown menu and select "Title/Description"

STEP 5: Assign a friendly URL to the page that matches the page's title

To add a new page to the guide, click the

STEP 6: Click the to change the layout of the page. The default is set to three columns, 25/50/25, but you may want to change that depending on the information you are trying to present.

STEP 7: Begin adding boxes to your page:

Create a new box or reuse an existing box by using the tabs.

Instead of building a guide from scratch, consider reusing a guide from a colleague at the library or from the LibGuides community. Reusing guides (especially from templates produced at NUL) promote consistency and save time and effort.

STEP 1: From the LG Dashboard, select "Create Guide."

STEP 2: Select "Copy Guide" and then find the guide you want to copy. If it is from another institution, be sure to contact the guide's original creator to get permission.

STEP 3: Customize the name and description. Assign a guide type and click "Create Guide"

STEP 4: Change the guide title and customize the description and URLs. Assign a subject and any applicable tags. With the exception of mapped boxes, you may also customize the rest of the guide's content, including adding and deleting databases from boxes, rearranging boxes, and changing the guide layout.

Template Examples

Freshman Seminar (exampe from the Northwestern University Library LibGuides)