Create a New Guide
To create a new guide, choose "Create Guide" in the LibGuides Shortcuts box on the LibGuides dashboard.
You can either create a guide from scratch by choosing "Start Fresh" or make a copy of an existing guide to use as a template. See Springshare's step-by-step instructions for creating guides from scratch or from an existing guide.
Configuring Your Guide
Type
General Purpose: The default guide type and a useful category for guides that do not fall into the other types listed below, e.g. Fake News, 3D Printing, International Games Day @ SJSU
Course Guides: Guides created for a specific course, e.g. ART100W
Subject Guides: A starting point for research on a specific academic discipline, department, program, or major, e.g. Child & Adolescent Development or Chemistry.
Topic Guides: Guides created about a specific research topic, e.g. Cybersecurity or Clinical Trials.
Internal Guides: For guides intended only for internal use, e.g. Library Gift Exchange. These guides do not appear in SJSU Library's research guide lists, but are accessible to those who have the guide's URL.
Template Guide: Some librarians create templates to make creating future guides more efficient, and these can be categorized as template guides. We currently do not have any template guides.
This is where they will appear:
Group
Unless you're creating a page for the library website, the only group you're going to need is Research Guides so that your guide will show up on the main Research Guides page.
Friendly URL
Giving your guide a friendly URL can make it easier to find:
Subjects and Tags
Subjects and tags are assigned to guides for organization and discoverability.
Subjects: Assigning a subject to your guide will make it appear under the appropriate subject on the LibGuides homepage. Assigning subjects also makes guides discoverable in OneSearch. Subject names are predetermined; you won't be able to create a new one.
Tags: You can assign any tags you'd like to your guides to aid with discoverability, but there are two that are important to use if you want your guides to appear in the Research Guides widget on the library website:
- subject_guide — so it will appear under Subject Guides
- course_guide — so it guide will appear under Course Guides
Springshare help: Assign subjects & tags to a guide
Adding Guide Editors
Although each LibGuide has only one owner, multiple users can still collaborate on guides. By default, regular-level users cannot edit guides they do not own, but if they are added as editors, they can do almost everything that guide owners can on a guide.
More information is available from the Springshare LibGuides Help: Assigning editors to a guide.
Publishing Your Guide
When you create a new guide, the default status is unpublished so the guide is not available for the public to view. When you're ready to share your guide:
- At the top right hand side of the page, click "Unpublished" to view the drop-down menu.
- Select Change Status & Share.
- Change Publication Status from unpublished to published or private.
- Click Save.