How to Stop Being a Librarian: Student-Centered Library Guide Design and Content Curation

Objective: The objective of this paper is to discuss information seeking behavior of digital-native students verses librarians and how this affects the design, layout, and content of effective library guides. Topics covered will include effective content curation for guides, web-user’s behavior patterns, design consistency, and tips & tricks for integrating design and content best practices across a library guide system. Methods: Springshare’s LibGuides is a platform that allows librarians to create and design topic-centered web pages called Library Guides which contain curated content; including library resources. While librarians generally follow webpage design best-practices in their library guides to increase their usage, these efforts may be undermined by the content that is later added to the guide. According to Sinkinson et al, most library guide content reflects the information seeking behavior of librarians instead of the information seeking behavior of their students. This leads to guides that students found “overwhelming and cluttered” despite librarians recognizing that students have different user behaviors and needs when designing their guides (Portal Libr Acad. 2012; 12(1):63-84. doi:10.1353/pla.2012.0008). This paper will discuss how librarians can use basic web-user behavior patterns, such as page scanning, viewing patterns, satisficing, and scrolling, to help them step into a student mindset to better curate their guide content and reinforce its use with their guide design. Basic strategies for implementing these changes across large library guide systems will also be covered. Results: A comparison of guide content clicks from Springshare’s LibGuide statistics platform, before and after the adoption of student-centered, best-practices guide design layout and content curation, shows a significant increase in the use of guide content. Conclusions: Using basic web-user behavior patterns, librarians can create best-practices for guide development that contain student-centered content along with guide layouts that assist students in finding convenient, curated, library resources.