Ubiquitous LibGuides: Variations in Presence, Production, Application, and Convention

Neuhaus, Chris; Cox, Angie; Gruber, Anne Marie; Kelly, Jim; Koh, HyunSeung; Bowling, Claire; Bunz, Gail

doi:10.1080/19322909.2021.1946457

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 35 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…6 Although librarians employ various tools to create web-based guides, the LibGuides platform from Springshare has been widely adopted for its ease of creating guides and pathfinders without the need for coding knowledge. 7 The platform also facilitates requests for permission to copy individual guides so that others can easily create derivatives with local branding. 8 LibGuides launched in 2007 and, as of April 2023, reports 913,616 total guides, created by 265,032 librarians, at 5,890 institutions, in 103 countries.…”

Section: Libguides As Resource To Inform Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Recommended by Librarians

Orth-Alfie,

Wolfe

2024

ITAL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

To study library guides, as published on Springshare’s LibGuides platform, new approaches are needed to expand the scope of the research, ensure comprehensiveness of data collection, and reduce bias for content analysis. Computational methods can be utilized to conduct a nuanced and thorough evaluation that critically assesses the resources promoted in library guides. Web-based library guides are curated by librarians to provide easy access to high-quality information and resources in a variety of formats to support the research needs of their users. Recent scholarship considers library guides as valuable resources and as de facto publications, highlighting the need for critical study. In this article, the authors present a novel model for comprehensively gathering data about a specific genre of books from individual LibGuide pages and applying computational methods to explore the resultant data. Beginning with a pre-selected list of 159 books, we programmatically queried the titles using the LibGuides Community search engine. After cleaning and filtering the resultant data, we compiled a list of 20,484 book references (of which 6,212 are unique) on 1,529 LibGuide pages. By testing against inclusion and exclusion criteria to ensure relevancy, we identified a total of 281 titles relevant to our topic. To gain insights for future study, citation analysis metrics are presented to reveal patterns of frequency, co-occurrence, and bibliographic coupling of books promoted in LibGuides. This proof-of-concept could be adopted for a variety of applications, including assessment of collections, public services, critical librarianship, and other complex questions to enable a richer and more thorough understanding of the information landscape of LibGuides.

show abstract

Section: Libguides As Resource To Inform Practicementioning

confidence: 99%