Location of "How to use this guide"

The content box "How to use this guide" on the Home page has an image of drop-down tab items that is 364 pixels wide. This means that it should only be used in the centre column which is usually 520 pixels wide (if you have 3 columns). If you use this content box in the left or right columns it will display OK in most browsers, but may cause problems in IE6 - we had one case where it displayed OK in the left column (though it was a bit hard to read because it was so small) but it pushed a content box from the right column into the centre column.

Writing for the web and other articles

I found these articles on the web which may be useful. They are written by a web / internet professional with strong experience in web marketing. The articles encourage looking at a website from a marketing point of view: encouraging visitors to stay and explore the site and try what is offered.

Web copy: getting it right
Interaction generation

The below articles are more related to commercial sites, however, they do give useful information on how to regularly communicate with our audience and encourage return visitors

Successful online retail
E-commerce: selling online while we are not trying to make a profit, we are trying to sell our databases and other resources as a better alternative to Google.

Alert services explain to users

Just sneaking on other libguides, and I found that adding a box (or tab) on Alert Services could be very useful and relevant for most of our libguides (well, not really for the libguides but for the users of those libguides). Three different alert services could be explain: Table of contents (eTOC), databases search and citation alerts. How about creating a generic one, and after that, we could adapt it to our respective subjects? The big question.... where users will find it? Under How to..., under Research, or Journal articles? My preference will be under Research, and as a tab. But this is just my opinion.

Some good examples:

http://guides.lib.msu.edu/page.phtml?page_id=669

http://libguides.usu.edu/content.php?pid=1590

Regards

Meebo

I have added content boxes to the Generic and Template guides for those of you who are using Meebo. You can copy or link to these boxes from your own guides.

Logos & other images

Quality images are powerful attention grabbers in LibGuides so I have contacted most of our major publishers seeking permission to use company logos in our guides. Most have agreed and I have placed their logos in the Generic content guide on a separate page called Images.

If there are other companies you'd like me to contact please just ask, or if you already have permission from a company I haven't included please let me know and I'll add it to the list. I'll keep the permissions all together for future reference.

Many companies have great packages of materials for promoting their products, including templates for emails and posters, training materials, banners, logos, videos. many companies are also happy to send you packages of materials for training sessions or showcases. We should use these free resources to maximise our investment in these expensive products (and save ourselves time!).

• BioMed Central has a Resource Center for Librarians that includes flyers, posters, online advertisements, web & catalogue text as well as logos.
• CABI also has promotional materials For Librarians
• Ovid has a Librarian Toolkit
• Credo has Promoting Credo Reference
• ProQuest has a Publisher Toolkit
• Sage has Usage Driving Materials
• Scopus has Promotional Tools
• Wiley has a Library Toolkit
• NetLibrary has a Marketing Kit
• Springer has Springer at YourLibrary 

Deep linking to Tropicat

In the training sessions we looked at how you would use the Books from the Catalog content box. The instructions for deep linking to items in Tropicat have been amended - there is no need to change the profile. Please check the revised instructions at Deep linking to the catalogue and always double-check that your links work.

Shared guides

We've had some discussions about how to handle shared authorship of guides and how the profile box should be constructed.  If there are multiple authors the software will add individual author profiles vertically in the right column and there is no option to reorder these boxes on the page. Because LibGuides allows up to 4 people to share a guide (original creator plus 3 editors) it could create a very long page!

To get around this problem I have set up a 3 examples on the Home page in the Template and Generic guides using a regular content box. As Alan suggested in his latest Technology Roundup No 6, we should minimise duplication of contact details so these examples simply link the user back to the profile pages on the CMS via the photos, the names and Website/profile/contact. If we go for this option you will need to hide the profile page/s on every page (sorry, but there is no option to switch them off for a whole guide).

Please let me know what you think of these examples, or if you have any other ideas about how we could handle the problem.

Notes on shared guides

The person who sets up the guide is the one who:

• Receives user comments or feedback
• Can check usage statistics
• Can check for broken links (and should fix them!)
• Will be listed as the "owner" librarian on the JCU LibGuides Home page