Key Terms
Guide: a mini-website on a topic. Guides are categorized 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 topic, 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 USC Libraries staff and faculty. 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: Also known as assets, includes text, links, databases, books, videos, widgets, RSS feeds, polls, etc.
Creating a Guide
STEP 1: From LibGuide Dashboard, select "Create Guide"
STEP 2: Complete the three essential items on the form.
Also, whenever possible, please adhere to the guide title and naming conventions outlined below.
Course Guides
Use department abbreviation + course number (as listed in Schedule of Classes), e.g. "ANTH 100g"
General Purpose Events
For events or if part of a series, use series name: event title, e.g. "Visions & Voices: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater"
Subject Guides
Core subjects for schools or departments. Use the subject name as listed in the Libraries' list of subject areas.
Topic Guides
Information on a certain topic, tool, or research area. Use the topic name.
STEP 3: Click the pencil icons to assign a friendly URL to the guide. Add a subject and tags so users can easily find your guide.
STEP 4: The default title of your first page is "Home." To assign your own title, click the "Page" dropdown menu and select "Page Properties."
You may now adjust the "Page Name" field.
STEP 5: To add a new page to the guide, click the "+" icon.
STEP 6: You may change the layout of the page to either a side menu or tabbed menu. The default is set to side menu, but you may want to change that depending on the information you are trying to present. Click the "picture" icon drop down from the top right menu and select "Guide Navigation Layout."
STEP 7: Begin adding boxes and columns to your page.
Create a new box or column or reuse an existing box or column.
Instead of building a guide from scratch, consider reusing a guide from a USC Libraries colleague or from the LibGuides community. Reusing guides (especially from templates produced at USC) promote consistency and save time and effort.
STEP 1: From the Libguide Dashboard, select "Create Guide."
STEP 2: From the "Choose Layout or Reuse" dropdown, select "Copy Content/ layout from existing 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.
Add a profile box
The LibGuides Committee suggests including contact information on each guide you create. This allows readers of the guide to find who is responsible for the guide, and report broken links or get further help.
How do I add contact information?
You don't have to do anything at all. Every time a new guide is created, a profile box is automatically added to one page of the guide. The profile box will automatically display the owner of the guide and their contact information. You can add the profile box on other pages/tabs of the guide as well: on any guide page, click "add box", then from the Type option, select Profile:
I don't want my contact information on a guide I made.
Not every guide is owned by a single person. You can remove the profile box from any guide you own by clicking the "X" (delete box) command on the profile box. If you delete the profile box, please add another box named Contact Information that includes one or more links to pages with contact information, such as a link to the Libraries' Reference Services homepage, an individual library homepage (e.g., the East Asian Library homepage), or a library page for a service (e.g. the Special Collections homepage, the Bioinformatics service homepage).
The guide is maintained by several people. I want all their profiles to appear.
This is a great way to ensure everyone contributing to LibGuide is recognized. If you own a guide, you can add other profile boxes as you wish.
Step 1: Add more profile boxes to your page. Initially, each profile box will show the owner of the guide.
Step 2: Locate the first profile box you want to change. Click the Edit Profile Selection () icon.
Step 3: In the Edit Profile Selection window, select the profile you want to display from the dropdown:
- To display the current guide owner's profile (default), select Display the guide owner's profile.
- To display any random profile for any account in your system, select Display a random profile.
- To display a randomly selected guide owner's profile, select Display a random guide owner.
- Or, select the profile for the specific user you want to display.
Step 4: Click the Close button.
Repeat this process until each profile box displays a different profile.