Libguides – the librarian created portals to high quality scientific research information

What is a LibGuide?

The Central Medical Library started to develop LibGuides last year, in collaboration with the University Library Groningen. A LibGuide is a basic guide with a selective overview of resources and tools in a particular field with students and beginning researchers being primary targets. The set of all LibGuides of the University of Groningen is available at: http://LibGuides.rug.nl / 

Why we chose for LibGuides 

LibGuides are the successors of the Electronic Literature Guides, which the library previously offered to students and beginning researchers.

These Literature Guides were manually edited overviews of resources per field on the library website. However, over time we became less satisfied with the Literature Guides, mainly because keeping them up-to-date was a laborious task and our web platform offers no Web 2.0 capabilities such as RSS or integration with social media.

During our search for a better solution to create overviews of library resources we found  Springshare’s LibGuides (http://www.springshare.com/LibGuides/). No other tool met our requirements as well as the LibGuides. The LibGuides are made by librarians for librarians and are already used by many libraries (so far mainly in the U.S.)

They are specially designed for our purpose: to create a basic guide with resources and tools per subject. Furthermore, they are affordable (approximately $1000,- per year), easy to make and easy to use, mobile friendly and offer many built-in tools. For example, you can integrate web chat or your virtual helpdesk inside your guides. A LibGuide is easy to integrate with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. You can simply insert web links, RSS feeds, polls, user feedback options and search boxes.

LibGuides are much easier to maintain than our former Electronic Literature Guides. Each element (or better: widget) of a LibGuide can be shared or reused in another LibGuide within the organization. For this purpose, we have made an internal ‘Derive LibGuide’ ​​specifically for the derivation of widgets. Changes to a basic widget become automatically visible in its derived widgets.

The LibGuides can be adjusted to the visual identity of your organization by adding your logo and color.

Available medical LibGuides

To date, the Central Medical Library has compiled five LibGuides: Medicine, Dentistry, Human Movement Sciences, Neuroscience and Nursing (in Dutch), all available at: http://LibGuides.rug.nl/profile/cmb. Upon request, we can easily create more LibGuides in consultation with departments or staff members of the UMCG. The statistics show that the LibGuides meet the needs of our patrons. For example, the Medicine LibGuide had almost 18,000 views in 2011. An evaluation of the LibGuides by our patrons will follow soon.