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Research guides: Best practices for design & accessibility

Welcome!

The purpose of this guide is to establish best practices for creating and maintaining LibGuides. These best practices are intended to be user-centred and rely on many web writing principles that would apply on any website (remember: LibGuides are websites! - Ula Lechtenberg, 2023). We have also included LibGuides-specific recommendations drawn from the LIS literature.

Overall recommendations

Before you go any further, some key recommendations that recur again and again in the literature and will appear throughout this guide:

  • Be concise: Cluttered, busy guides are unappealing and a barrier for users
  • Put the most important information on the Home page
  • Limit the number of side tabs on your guide (6-7 is the general recommendation)
  • Keep resource descriptions concise (no more than 2 sentences clearly explaining their purpose), but DO have those explainers!
  • Choose bullet points over blocks of text
  • Avoid (or at least define) library jargon
  • Teach your guide in your library instruction sessions so the students see the immediate relevance to their coursework 
  • Consider creating individual course guides, ideally in consultation with the course professor