Have a target audience

For whom are you composing the guide? Is it primarily aimed at undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty members? This will affect not only the sources that you choose, but how you organize those sources and the language you use to describe them. A section of a guide on “bibliographic databases” might be useful for faculty members, but you might want to call it “find articles” if your guide is created for undergrads.

Have a purpose

Once you have defined your target audience, define the service you want to provide for them. Will the page serve as a general starting point for research or is it designed to answer particular types of questions? Is the page intended for a particular class or assignment? At this stage it may be useful to think about what your guide can do that a list of Google results cannot.

Have a collection development policy

This may only exist in your mind, but it needs to exist. It should flow naturally from your guide’s purpose. Do not include a site just because it “has to do with” your topic. Ask yourself if it fulfills your purpose for your audience. It is common to see professional organizations listed on Web guides, yet these pages often provide little information beyond upcoming conference dates and publication guidelines for the organization’s journal. This information is of little value to an undergraduate student. One benefit to having a policy is that it will prevent your guide from growing out of control (see “Keep it short,” below).

One general rule that I observe: I rarely link to “meta-sites” (i.e., sites whose primary purpose is to link to other sites). Due to the historical factors mentioned above, a large portion of the Web is devoted to linking to other parts of the Web. You are already constructing one list. Linking to other lists can lead patrons down a frustrating road of endless links and little content.

Select the appropriate level of link specificity

Is it really useful to link to the homepage of the U.S. Geological Survey? What do you envision a patron doing once he arrives there? Some Web sites, including those of many government agencies, are so vast that just providing a link to the main site is almost useless. At the very least, you should provide some tips on how the visitor should proceed. Better yet, link directly to pages of interest (e.g., “earthquakes”). The specific page will almost certainly feature a direct link “up” to the main site, if the visitor wishes to explore further, but the path “down” from the homepage to the content of interest may be hard to find.

Decide on an organizational scheme

This is where you get to exercise one of the traditional strengths of our profession. Generally, we’re pretty good at organizing stuff. Sadly, we often organize things in ways that make sense only to ourselves. An example is the Web guide that is organized by resource type, as if patrons come to the library thinking, “I’d like to see a handbook about organic chemistry.” Patrons have questions to which they want answers. It is our job to know the types of resources and when they are appropriate, not theirs.

A related issue is whether to highlight print resources in a Web guide. I favor this practice, based on the philosophy expressed above that our patrons want information regardless of where it may be found. It could be argued that for certain user groups (e.g., undergraduates) this may not be the case, and that for those groups Web resources may be perceived as inherently more valuable than those in print. Inclusion of print resources can be seen as a marketing strategy. We spend a great deal of money on books. Web guides are an easy way to promote their use.

Here are a few organizational schemes that you might consider:

Conclusion

A thoughtful and well-maintained subject guide can be a valuable resource for library users and an excellent marketing tool for the institution. The rules above can serve as guidelines to keep your guides relevant and informative.