Keep Your Guide Up to Date

As with all other online content it is important to keep your guide current and to continually review to make sure it is still serving the purpose you originally intended.

Seeing a Last Updated date from 6 months or more ago can indicate to our users that a guide is not being maintained.

Link Checking

You should frequently check the links in your guides. For links added as Databases, Links, or Book Assets, you can use Springshare's Link Checker feature.

Go to Link Checker under Tools, enter your name in the box for owner, and then click on the edit icon to correct the url.

 

For links in added in Rich Text boxes, check by hand or use a free link checker service like W3C Link Checker or the Check My Links extension for Chrome.

Statistics

LibGuides statistics can help you identify:

  • Heavily used guides and/or pages to prioritize for updating.
  • Low-use guides or pages to rethink, merge with with other guides, or retire.
  • How often assets (links) are being used. (Note: these statistics are only available for links added using the "add a link" function).

See Springshare View and export Searches statistics in LibGuides

Making the Decision to Retire Your LibGuide

There is nothing negative about deleting one of your guides. Sometimes interest in a topic has simply run its course or you have other responsibilities that need your focus.

Ways to identify whether or not your guide has come to the end of its life cycle:

  • Do statistics show decreasing or only low views of the guide?
  • Has the course you created a guide for ceased to be taught?
  • Is the relevant discipline now focusing on other topics?
  • Do you no longer have an interest in or time to maintain the guide?

Saying yes to any of these questions means you should take a closer look at whether or not your guide should stay published or whether it's time for its status to change.

Private vs. Unpublished vs. Deleting Your Guide

Should you decide to remove your guide from public view you have three choices in how to proceed: unpublish, make private, or delete. If you delete a guide it cannot be recovered so you may want to move it to unpublished or private before taking that final step.

table indicating that unpublished guides are not viewable to the public, that private guides are only viewable to public if they have the url, and that published guides are viewable to everyone. Also only published guides are listed on libguide homepages and in search results.

You can change a guide's status to Unpublished or Private within the guide itself. To delete a guide you need to go under Content to Guides and then find your guide in the list and click on the X to delete.