LibGuides Standards & Best Practices: Creating Content

Be Concise & Well-Organized

Less is more. Users are often better served by content that is concise as opposed to exhaustively thorough.

• Keep it simple. Use short sentences and short paragraphs.
• Use meaningful section headings to split content up into readable length.
• Use bulleted lists or numbered lists (when information is sequential) to group related information in chunks and make it easy to skim.
• Resources listed in order of importance rather than alphabetically, as students tend to use the first resources listed.
• Keep lists of resources short – maybe to the top 7 key resources featured prominently. One may also consider breaking long lists of resources into different link groups based on similar content type.

Consider Your Users

Most content should be geared towards our users, not ourselves. Think about what tasks your users need to do and how your content can help them do that.

• Use plain language (avoid jargon, slang, idioms, and acronyms; use common words over more difficult ones; use active voice; it’s ok to address the user as “you”).
• Don’t bury the lead. Put the most important information at the top of the page.
• Provide a clear “call to action.” If next steps are needed, don’t bury them as links in the middle of a paragraph – separate them out to draw attention to them.
• Be inclusive: use gender-neutral terms; use B.C.E. and C.E. instead of B.C. and A.D.

Make It Easier to Find

• Make sure guide and page titles provide context. Keep the titles short, descriptive and consistent.
• Make sure your guide has at lease one subject assigned.
• Add metadata to subject and course guides for inclusion in Blackboard. 
• Use friendly URLs. Friendly URLs increase the usability of guides, as patrons are more likely to remember and reuse a guide if the URL is short and easy. 
• Be Selective & Future-friendly

Creating and maintaining high-quality content can be time-consuming. Do your future self a favor and consider whether your decisions will cause more work than is necessary in the future.

• Focus on creating content that only the library could provide. Remember that any page you create will need to be maintained regularly in the future so be selective about what you choose to create.
• Avoid providing content through a linked PDF (that is hard to update).
• Use language that won’t need updating. For example, instead of “The new classroom will become available in September 2015” say “As of September, 2015 the classroom is available…”

Based on Best Practices: Layout & Content from University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Use caution when copying & pasting content from any source, especially Word documents. Many times hidden style code will also be copied along that could break with best practices and introduce inaccessible content.

There are a few ways to avoid hidden style code from being placed into your guide. The rich text editor has a few useful tools to use.  

•  This button will show a popup box that will strip out all text formatting and leave behind plain text. Best for simple text.
•  This button will show a popup box that will keep a lot of the original formatting from the Word document source. This is also the default behavior when pasting directly into the rich text editor. This does not follow best practices so try not to use this feature unless you plan to go through the source and clean up the formatting by hand!
•  This button will remove all formatting from selected text inside the rich text editor. This will generally solve strange formatting issues you may find from copied text. This button will also remove hard-coded widths from tables that may overflow your guide.

Based on LibGuides Standards and Best Practices: Accessibility from Boston College Libraries.