La Vida LibGuide Checklists

1. Week 1: Getting Started

1. Title: start the guide name with a strong, findable keyword

1. (i.e. Abstract Writing not Writing an Abstract)

2. Description: use keywords, but keep it 10 words or less. Each page/tab has a place to add a description also. The page/tab description is a good opportunity to improve the SEO of the guide.
3. Ensure that the guide has a friendly URL for the entire guide and each tab. The friendly URL is really important! Double check this.
4. Add “subjects” ; if you feel the subject of your guide isn’t here, I can add it
5. Add “tags” ; make up tags if you can’t find one that fits, but don’t add a tag that you think only applies to one guide

2. Week 2: Connecting with faculty

1. Email, call or visit office hours of one faculty member
2. Have a list of 5 questions to ask them about the libguide you are creating
3. Send them the link to the libguide after you make changes
4. Add a link in the libguide to a recommended resource from the instructor if possible.
5. Encourage them to link to your site from their Canvas course, website, or syllabus

3. Week 3: Learning objectives (See Quality Matters 2.1)

1. Write learning objectives that you want to accomplish with your guide

1. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy, write a learning objective for the entire guide
2. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy, write learning objectives for each tab

2. Include the objectives using one of the “heading” fonts (start with h3 and use a hierarchy to specify ideas within ideas using h4, h5, or h6)

4.  Week 4: Heading tags. Heading tags are very important to how your LibGuide is interpreted by pretty much anything electronic. If you post your guide on social media, get crawled by search engine crawlers, get indexed by a database, they will scan your HTML markup for these heading tags and assume they are in order of importance.

1. As if preparing for an essay, write an outline by filling in these blanks:

1. Title: name of the first tab

1. H1: name of the LibGuide

1. H2: name of one of the boxes in this guide
2. H2: name of one of the boxes in this guide
3. H2: name of one of the boxes in this guide

2. Title: name of the second tab

1. H1: name of the LibGuide

1. H2: name of one of the boxes in this guide
2. H2: name of one of the boxes in this guide
3. H2: name of one of the boxes in this guide

3. Title: name of the third tab

1. H1: name of the LibGuide

1. H2: name of one of the boxes in this guide
2. H2: name of one of the boxes in this guide
3. H2: name of one of the boxes in this guide

2. Does your outline flow like it should? Are the words in H2 subtopic headings for the H1 area? Does the “Title” stand on its own? Avoid abbreviations, dates, and class numbers in the title and opt more for descriptive keywords. You may use the description box for a class name, instructor collaboration, or event. LibGuides has set it up so that your tab name is the page’s name, so make sure it makes sense on its own.

1. Make sure your H2 titles have keywords
2. Delete or combine boxes that aren’t direct subtopics of your main topic

3. Finally, add an H3 and then H4 headings inside the boxes if you’ve broken down your topic even further.
4. Extra credit: To see your headings outline, go to the W3C validator and check the “show outline” box (it’s in the lower left of the gray area).

1. Paste the URL of your guide in the box and click “Check”
2. Scroll to the bottom of the report to see your outline. Is it green? If so, you’ve done a great job!

5. Week 5: Accessibility

1. Learn about aria tags and insert a label of one of your page elements for screen readers
2. Check that all your images have alt=”” tags (you can do this in the easy edit screen--check this video for help)
3. If your guide has videos made by someone else, check the closed captioning. If the closed captioning in YouTube is terrible (the auto captioning likely is), see if the video accepts user submitted captioning to make this video better for us to include. Or switch it out for a video with good captioning (this is part of WCAG 2.0 requirements for accessibility)
4. Look at your guide on Screenfly to see if it’s compatible with all devices (yes even the Motorola RAZR!) http://quirktools.com/screenfly/
5. Tables are problematic, so if you must use them, mark them with these guidelines 

1. Here’s another tutorial for tables

6. Week 6: Redundancies

1. Remove anything that’s replicated on another page (especially “Find Books” “How to Search the Databases” or “Developing a topic” as these are overused and could be interesting if you made them unique to your topic)
2. If the content is covered on another guide, include a link to that guide instead of dumping all the content into the guide.
3. If a tab is reused many places, have the admin make it into a guide that all can link to.

7. Week 3: Images

1. Alternative text: it’s not optional. You can use multiple words and spaces are allowed, but keep it short. This is the text that is read to a blind person looking at your guide. Also, it is the keystone to accessibility. Click the link for details about accessibility and alt tags.
2. File name: always include the keywords from your libguide in the picture’s name before uploading it. Images that are named photo4.jpg or IMG003223.png or pic.gif are not going to help the accessibility or findability of that guide. A guide about women’s rights that has a picture of a woman protesting should be named woman_protesting.jpg.
3. Alignment is tricky for images and text in the same box; consider confining images to their own box. Try the “floating box” (new feature for LibGuides) option to get rid of the box name and square around your image.
4. Size: enter the size in percentages to allow for different sized screens. If your design allows you to fill the box with that image, use 100% for the width, leave the height box empty if you do this.

5. Pixabay, unsplash, or photos for class are ideal for creative commons images
6. Is there too much text in your images? Screenshots that include text should be swapped out for text. They aren’t accessible. That means NO INFOGRAPHICS (Sorry!)

8. Week 8: Getting the word out (Do one or more of the following)

1. Post your libguide to a form of social media such as twitter, facebook, tumblr, or LinkedIn to show your friends how hard you’ve been working.
2. An ideal way to promote the guides is to cite it as a source on Yahoo Answers. The practice of answering Yahoo Answers is good for reference desk practice and empowers us to give intelligent answers to dumb questions. Yahoo Answers that people find useful are very good for SEO and can show up in Google searches for those looking for that same answer. Here’s an example of a great Yahoo Answer by a librarian with a signature we could imitate.
3. Do you create libguides at other institutions? If so, linking to our libguide in that one shows off your hard work in both places.
4. Post a link to your libguide in the comments section of another article or blog

9. Week 9: LibGuide Particulars

1. When you add a link to a LibGuide, use the ⚙ Add / Reorder ⏷ then choose Link. If you highlight your text in the Rich Text editor and use the 🔗symbol, it doesn’t add the link as an asset and won’t end up in our broken links report if the link ever breaks. Here’s more about the Rich Text editor.
2. If you make a copy of a guide, it makes a copy of every single asset inside that guide. Tell an admin that those duplicate assets need to be deleted. If you are an admin, don’t leave duplicate copies of guides or assets in the system: delete those dupes!
3. Don’t add a new asset if it’s already been added. This goes for links, books, databases, and files. The reason for this: when an asset is updated every instance is updated too.
4. Never add a database as a link. A database is added to Libguides as a database and is always added with the proper proxies. If you add it as a link, it may not be updated properly and may not be accessible from off campus.
5. When adding a resource behind a paywall (resources that students must sign in to use), like a permalink to a database article or a permalink to an ebook, you MUST click "YES" next to the "Use Proxy?" option in the interface.
6. (just for Shoreline) When citing a source, add a new floating box under the cited source. Reuse the box from "Findmockup" and select "Citation box (click preview eye to see style)". This box will automatically format your citation with a hanging indent.