Purpose & Goals

When talking about library guide design, we often hear about the concept of “best practices” being reiterated. But are these “best practices” placing form over function? Using Princeton University Library as a case study, this paper raises the question of whether or not the most-visited library guides adhere to these “best practices” and tackles what key features these most-visited guides share.

Design & Methodology

1. This paper first defines best practices by synthesizing the literature of library-guide “best practices” published both formally (i.e., in academic journals) and informally (e.g., “how-to” guides used for librarian education).
2. Libguides data is analyzed to determine overall guide usage, and to identify Princeton University Library’s most-visited library guides over a five-year period. These top-visited guides are then analyzed to determine their level adherence to these best-practices.
3. These top-visited guides are then qualitatively explored to identify potential factors that have led to them being so heavily visited.

Conclusions

Top-visited guides at Princeton focus less on adhering to design best-practices and more on thoroughly addressing a specific objective. We should consider shifting the conversation away from what is currently a lecture on “best practices” of design towards a data-driven dialogue about form and function in our library guides. Further questions this work raises include: --Who is the actual audience of our library guides? Are we designing for students when we should be designing for each other?

Implications & Value

Library Guide design (or, more often, redesign) is widely discussed in the field and appears to be a continual pain point amongst practitioners. While we often design our library assessment based on best practices or perceived needs, these methods often overlook what is consistently used amongst our researchers. This work would allow usage data to be included in the conversation about how we assess library guide design.