RIOT: Guides

I was quite pleased to see the 2014 ACRL IS Innovation Award-winning library research guide, Library DIY. I love it. I’ve always liked to idea of a step-by-step guide or a flowchart guide, and in fact I’ve played around with developing a dichotomous key for common library research tasks.

There’s nothing wrong with our setup, but I often think that students, especially first-year students, may not be so good at knowing the steps of what they need to do, and therefore not so good at articulating what help they need. And many libraries’ setups, including ours, rely on the users being able to identify the steps of their process and then go looking for that specific help.

The beauty of the Library DIY is that the standard steps are articulated for the users. This is lovely teaching, I think—providing answers, plus showing users what the steps are at the same time. It’s also great teaching for instructors—if any chance to check it out—to see what it is that their students need help learning to do and to show the instructors the level at which their students are thinking about the research process. It could even be helpful as a guide to instructors as they design assignments.

I have several thoughts and questions about this for our discussion.

Do we have a definitive rubric for guides? If we brainstorm to construct one, what are some criteria? Here’s a start:
1) Teachability—how well it teaches; how many different audiences it teaches (students on which levels, instructors, library staffers who aren’t in user services…)
2) Ease of use
3) Comprehensiveness of topics covered
4) Timeless/long-lived or will content units become dated?
5) Is it interactive? Is it an info dump?
6) Frustration level?
7) Goals?—different guides have the same goals or different goals
8) Placement and findability—Is it in a place on the site where users are likely to look for this information? Could it popup if users spend a designated amount of time doing or not doing something? How to describe/tag it, for users who want to search the library website?
9) Macro or micro level of assistance/coverage? General or specific?

What formats are being used for guides? What are pros and cons of different formats? There’s a reason why they use dichotomous keys in plant biology, for example, but there may be no analogous work to do in, say, social work. Certain guide formats may be a more natural fit for certain subject areas. What are some Helping Tools for common tasks in other disciplines?
_______. 2014. Dichotomous key. Wikipedia entry. Retrieved 02/10/14.

American Library Association. 2014. Farkas, Hofer, Molinelli and Willson-St. Clair win 2014 ACRL IS Innovation Award. ALA News.

Farkas, Meredith. 2012. In Practice: The DIY Patron. American Libraries 43(11/12):29.

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