 Hey, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar. You can call us a webcast, an online show. If you have issues with that terminology webinar, I know many people do. Call us whatever you want. We are here live every Wednesday morning online at 10 a.m. Central Time. If you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record the show and all of our recordings are posted onto our YouTube channel and any presentations from people, any links that are mentioned during shows. We gather all that and post them also onto our website. So I will show you that at the end of this show so you can see where you can get to all of our recordings. Both our live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with any of your colleagues out there or anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we've had on the show. Send them over to our website and they can check them out there. We do a mixture of things on the show, book reviews, mini training sessions, interviews, demos. Basically our main criteria really is if it is library related, we are happy to have the topic on the show. We do do sessions with library commission staff sometimes, but we also do bring in guest speakers as we have done this morning. On the line with us is Jason Puckett who's from Georgia, Georgia State University. Hi, Jason. Hi, Krista. Thanks so much for the invitation. Hi, everybody. Thanks. We are very glad to have you here. He is the author of a new book which has just been published, correct? It's out now? Yeah, it just came out November. Yeah, from ACRL and don't worry mentioning where you can find the book in the presentation. Okay. A book about modern pathfinders which is what his talk is gonna be out. So, you know, lots of people out there, more often in universities, but I know also in public libraries, use these kind of online research guides, lib guides, and whatever you may have out there. And Jason's gonna tell us all about those and how you can really make good use of them, right? I hope so. Everything and anything we need to know in just an hour. No pressure. I'll do my best, Krista. All right, go ahead. Take it away then. Thanks very much. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Let me tell you just a word or two about myself. That's me. Hi, everybody. I'm a subject librarian for communication for the communication department and newly the computer science liaison librarian. I also, one of my titles is virtual services librarian, which means basically I run our our lib guides and our our lib chat services or virtual reference services as well. I teach some workshops for Simmons College. If you're interested in, you know, hearing more about some of this stuff, I will probably have some some workshops coming up with Simmons this year. I'm the author of a couple of books. The most recent one and most relevant one is called Modern Pathfinders. These are both from ACRL. I'm also the author of a guide about Zotero that's a few years old now, but I'm working on a second edition that's coming this year. So, Krista, I've got my chat window minimized just to kind of reduce the number of distractions that I have on my screen while I'm juggling slides and such, but if you want if you want to pause for questions at any point, just attract my attention and I'm happy to take a moment for questions. No problem. I'm happy to interrupt. Great. Terrific. Okay. What I would like to do, I was telling Krista that the last version of this talk I gave was an hour and a half. What I've tried to do is kind of cut my slides down to the essentials this time and I will do my best to keep an eye on the time and I would really love to leave 10 minutes for questions at the end, so I'm going to do my best to do that. I know we can run over a few minutes if we need to, but I don't want to keep people longer, so I'm going to do my best. So, what we are going to be doing today, my intention, this is not a how to use LibGuide section. This is going to be more principles that anybody can use with any system that you may be using for guides. If you've got a homegrown system, if you're using Wikis to build your research guides, whatever system you're using, this will not be specific to LibGuides, although I do use LibGuides and that will be probably where my examples are coming from. I'm coming at this from the point of view of an instruction library and a public service librarian. As I said, I'd love to have people chime in with questions as we go. My background is entirely in the academic libraries, but as Christa said, I think that this is going to be useful to anybody who uses research guides in whatever form. I don't think that this will be specific very much to academic libraries. I'm not coming at this from the point of view of a systems librarian or from a systems administrator. I'm really what I'm going to be talking about today I think is going to be useful for any instruction librarian or any librarian that makes research guides for your users. So, let's talk a little bit about terminology. When we say, I've sort of settled on research guide as my generic term, but these are called a lot of different things at a lot of different libraries. Research guides, pathfinders is a little bit of an old-fashioned term. It's not so much in Vogue anymore, but I kind of like it. I feel like it's an evocative term and I intentionally use it in the title of my book and my talk. But you'll hear these things called WebGuides, SubjectGuides, and LibGuides has become sort of a generic term, you know, like Xerox or Band-Aid. I think, you know, if you say LibGuides, most people know what you're talking about, even if you're not specifically using the LibGuide software. But what we're talking about, and this is kind of a definition that I've settled on here, it's a webpage that addresses a specific information need. It's created by librarians, other libraries to have create and edit these things as well. I'm using librarians broadly here, but it's any page on the library website that is designed to help users with a specific information need. These are often maybe typically for a class, but not necessarily. You know, one of the guides that gets the most use of my Zotero guide, that's not aimed at a specific class, but it is aimed at an audience that has a specific and defined information need. I come across this definition, a lot or variations of it, where we talk about research guides being a list of resources or a list of links. And I want to talk about a lot today about how that is a little bit of a limiting idea, I think. We use these guides in a lot of different ways besides just providing lists of database links. We use them as teaching tools, and that can be as a substitute for a class or to supplement an in-person class. We use these as access points, or our users certainly use them as access points to a lot of resources. They will find, frequently, they'll find a research guide before they will find the main library homepage, depending on what they're searching for. As I say, they may be a substitute for a class. They're often a contact point with a librarian. I have students come to the reference desk from time to time and say, oh, you're Jason. I recognize you from your picture on your Zotero guide or your picture on one of your journalism guides or whatever. It can be the place where people find my email address, where people discover that we offer a particular service. So there are a lot more than just a list of links or a list of resources. And so I'd like us to keep that idea in mind. It really can be a much more versatile tool than just providing a list of links. So what I want to talk about today, this is sort of the big idea, and this is really, this slide is sort of a summary of what I want to cover today. This is really a preview of what we're going to talk about for the next half hour or 40 minutes. Guides are not just a list of links, as I said. Really, one of the ideas that I'd like to promote is approach the creation of a guide in the same way that you would approach planning a class. Again, I'm coming at this from the point of view of an instruction librarian, and there may be a lot of other contexts beside class planning. But that's one of the ideas that I really like to promote when you're putting together a guide. Think of it the same way that you would think of planning for a class. I really do believe that it's a teaching tool. I want to talk about some ideas about how the user's perspective helps us in planning guides and how understanding the assignment or the task that the student needs to address can be really helpful to us in our guides planning. One thing that we do a lot is put too much information in our guides, and I'll talk about some ways, some concrete ways we can address that, not overloading the user with too much information. We're going to talk about design, and let me explain a little bit about what I mean when I use the word design. In the course of doing research for my book about guides and for my talks about guides that I've done recently, I've really settled on a couple of design ideas that I think are going to be useful to us in planning guides. I mean design in a couple of different stenses. One is instructional design. As you can tell already from my talk, teaching is a big part of my work. Instructional design has really informed a lot of my ideas about how to talk about research guides and how to think about research guides. If you don't have an instructional design background, don't worry. I'm going to talk about some very simple ideas that we can apply to guide planning. The same goes for an idea called user experience design, and you'll see this abbreviated frequently as UX. This is a principle from web design that a lot of librarians are not familiar with. I'm going to talk again about some very simple ideas from UX design and how they can help us in planning guides. Librarians are really not trained as web designers. Most of us are not anyway. It really behooves us a lot to think about the fact that we're working in a medium and what works well on a web page that may not work well elsewhere or vice versa. I want to start with some instructional design plans. One of the most important principles to me that I use really fundamentally in my teaching planning is a focus on learning objectives. All this means is have a clear idea in your mind when you're going into planning a class or a guide about what you want your students to be able to do after consulting the guide after taking class that they couldn't do before. Also I'm using the word students. For me, typically my audience is students. If you're coming from a public library background, that may be something very different for you. You can substitute the word users anytime I'm using the word students. What I'm talking about is just whoever is learning, learners might be a good word. Whoever is consulting your informational resources. For me, they are literally students most of the time. For you, they may be library users. You may have some other context. Faculty can be students in this sense. Faculty can certainly be learners in the library context. How do you define learning objectives when you're planning a guide? Get rid of the idea of how to use the library. We often plan these things way too broadly. Instruction librarians who are listening, you will know you often get a request for. Just teach them in an hour how to use the library. We laugh at that and that's a ridiculous goal to try to hit. Frequently we will have these very broad ideas when we're planning a guide that are almost that broad or almost that broad. An effective learning objective should be, I think I've got here in my bullet points, it should be something specific you want them to learn. It should be measurable or observable in some way. You don't literally have to measure the result of this. Frequently we can't measure the results of a guide, but it should be something that you could observe. You could measure in some way if you had these people in the room or if you gave a quiz afterwards. It should be something that could be measurable. I'll give you a second and that will make some more sense. It should be something that's results-oriented that is, excuse me, your users should be able to do something afterward that they couldn't accomplish before. Typically it's going to be based on a need. Usually they're coming to your guide because they have an information need. Whether that is literally an assignment as most of my library users are coming to my guide because they have to accomplish a course assignment or it may be something a little broader like they need to be able to accomplish a simple task, place an item on reserve or place an interlibrary loan or search by call number. It can be anything like that. Now why is this important? It's useful in a number of very practical ways. For instruction librarians you can use your guide as a teaching aid. You can use your guide as an outline. If they're not coming to a class it can substitute for a class in that sense. This is something that helps users connect with the guide by finding what they need. By finding I mean they may be searching on the web to locate the information that they need and coming across your guide and being able to recognize your guide as a useful and relevant resource. It may be something where they're looking at the guide, they're skimming the page for what they need. Based on the guide on learning objectives can help them spot within the page what they need. That really does help indicate to them yes this is a relevant information resource and if you're working with a course instructor as academic librarians often are it can really help demonstrate to the instructor okay I have based this guide on your assignment. Take a look at how closely I've planned the guide based on the learning needs that I see that your students have. So a learning objective in a nutshell really is just define if I'm teaching them something in class what am I teaching them. If I had them in a class hypothetically you may not be doing classes for all of your guides probably or not but if this were a class instead of a guide what would I be teaching them to do. So for example these are some some learning objectives from my work just as examples. A good phrasing to start with is students or learners should be able to do this thing whether it's locating primary sources distinguishing distinguishing between two different types of source. They need to be able to ultimately create a literature review. They need to be able to install Zotero. This is the level of specificity that I would recommend that you have in mind when you're working on planning objectives for a guide. I would recommend that this be something this is what I'm talking about when I say something that should be measurable in some sense. You may not be observing students locating historical newspapers but you could if you were sitting down with students you could observe whether or not that they can do this. Now if you use learning objectives that are based around words like they should understand that's a much harder thing to observe or much harder thing to measure and that's what makes in my mind that's what makes a good learning objective something that they can do something that they can accomplish that if you were in the room with them you could observe whether or not they are able to accomplish this. So observe excuse me avoid thinking in terms of they should understand this. This just helps you plan and this is a very practical technique this helps you plan what should I include on the guide what kind of instructions should I have on the guide what kind of resources that I should have on the guide. And as I said I'm talking really a lot about assignments about specific learning outcomes and there may not be a literal assignment depending on what your teaching context is but if you have an assignment specifically in hand that you can tailor the guide so to speak that can really help you a lot in planning the guide. I've got a couple of links here and the URLs are here just for your later reference and let me let me pop a couple of these up. I think you can see my my web browser there where I've got a research guide by Lilloria Canada. This is a colleague of mine terrific. Okay thanks Kristen. This is a great example I think and let me see if I can sorry I've got too many windows open let me see if I can pull up my highlighter or my spotlight okay I don't know if it's showing or not that's okay I'm not gonna worry about it. What I've got here I think you can see my mouse pointer what I've got here is this is a great example because she's taken the assignment broken down what students need to do there's a welcome page I'm not a big fan of welcome pages and I've tried to get rid of those on my guides but she's got a good sort of step-by-step process here for the students on her welcome pages. There's a pretest so she is clearly using this in a class environment but what I really want to call out here is that she's got some good labels here what is a lit review what are empirical articles it really shows that she's broken down the the objectives that students need to be able to accomplish they need to create a lit review in order to do that they need to be able to define empirical articles they need to know what they are that's getting close to an understand objective but she's got some really good concrete stuff here and I'm really a big fan of how do I find if I were designing this guide I might go with how do I find these how do I cite them and maybe think about condensing these I'm a big fan of condensing information on a guide that is now I've got my browser is a little unresponsive here I don't think I'm going to go with here we go I don't think I'm going to take you through there we go that's working I don't think I'm going to take you through all of these but I do want to show you another example from what I've done not all of my guides are model examples but I do want to show you sort of principles that I'm talking about so when I talk about breaking down the assignment breaking down the learning objectives by the assignment I literally took this from the assignment that the students were handed by the instructor they have to write a journal entry about teens as a constructed audience and here's a couple of resources for that they have to do another journal entry about press coverage of a particular topic here's some resources for that I've given some very concise instructions here I would probably cut this description way down this is too much for a an undergrad especially first-year undergrad class to work with again too much information here but I've broken it down by the steps of the assignment I'm going to leave the other ones for now but that's when I talk about constructing a guide based on based on the steps of the assignment and tailoring it to the assignment that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about another thing whoops another thing that we love to do is put too much information on a guide because we're trying to put in everything that students might possibly need the library already has a website hopefully students are already aware of the library's website where you can direct them to it for more information but your guide is not the main library website your guide has a specific information need and don't try to put everything on there it leads to confused students because they can't find what they need and it leads to a lot of extra work for the librarian because there's there's much more content to update oh Jason before sorry before you go on someone does have a question about one of your comments when you're on the the guides there why do you say that welcome pages are not a good idea I think and I may address this later on one of my slides I think that it's possible to do a good welcome to my guide page but I think the best guides will jump right into this is useful resources right there on the first page studies have shown that students are going to look at a guide for literally seconds before they decide whether they're going to use it or not and I think it's better to have some resources right on the front page that say these are useful databases for your topic here's how to search these databases I think that's going to capture students attention a lot better than a nice friendly welcome message even even a brief one that says here's what you'll find on this guide here's here's a paragraph about how to find the librarian I think it it has a lot more resonance and a lot more immediacy for the students if they see this is something that's specifically based on my assignment I think they're going to stick around a lot more a lot more for that yeah that's what I was going to say they already know why they're going to this particular place you don't need to say explain why they're there I mean if ideally it says assignment or a certain topic they wanted to research they already know that that's that's that's the reason they're there you don't need to tell them again right and let me I'm gonna hold that thought for just a second because I have some some discussion in just a bit about using language from the assignment and how that can help a guide but I really think that if students get on your guide and the first thing they see is oh I recognize this terminology from the assignment that I'm holding in my hand from my student from my instructor I think that's going to make a bigger impression on a student than a nice friendly welcome message would students especially undergraduate students are very practically focused they're focused very strongly on is this going to meet my need and if not they're going to move on literally in less than a minute and not see the rest of your very carefully crafted guide so that's why that's instant gratification instant gratification and some ways to use some ways to do that are really is really to use some of the terminology and the specific language from the assignment and I've got some I've got some examples from that I'm going to show you in just a minute really good question though and that's something that I harp on a lot in some of the guide workshops that I that I teach for Simmons is I will tell people to just kill the welcome pages and go straight into a step one of the assignment page instead someone does have a question about us now about what you're talking about here about it's not the library site I didn't know if you're going to mention this that they asked to keep duplicating information do you recommend sending users from the guide to the library page instead of replicating it is that what you're talking about I would much rather give somebody a link to the inner library loan page than a paragraph of instructions about interlibrary loan one line that says you can borrow books from other libraries and make that a link to the interlibrary loan page rather than a full sidebar of instructions that's usually the way to go in my opinion and this is what I'm talking about on this on this page here the slide excuse me is we what we really want is a subset that's very carefully curated to meet the the immediate information need on the guide specific to the task at hand and as the subject specialist or not necessarily you may not necessarily specifically be the subject specialist but as the librarian who is tasked with meeting this information need use your expertise in your judgment about what is going to be immediately relevant and what is going to be cut anything that that would be nice to have and put links to anything that you think is really going to be useful and you really don't want to be loose you don't want to lose but keep it concise and keep it very carefully curated and selected let me just in the interest of time these are these are great unless you got another question lined up let's let's keep moving though nope go ahead okay great so one thing that we we are often called upon to make is what I'm calling a subject guide here and that's a more general guide like for me a journalism guide as opposed to a journalism 4800 ethics guide a guide to the entire discipline these are really tough to make well and a lot of a lot of studies have found that that students again particularly undergraduate students don't connect well with these but they do find that guides that are focused on specific courses are a lot more useful this is among other things this is because students are used to using learning management systems where there is a page that's based on their course they're not used to thinking in terms of themselves as say a history student they they do think of themselves as a student that is enrolled in you know introduction to us history course but they don't necessarily connect that with the broader discipline of history or biology or whatever you're showing them so it's a lot easier I find to make effective guides that are based on a course because again I'm a big fan of that learning need that specific information need if you are tasked with create creating a subject guide that is a history guide or a biology guide or a guide that's supposed to address an entire discipline it's a lot more challenging challenging to do my approach is still to think in terms of learning objectives what is a common what is a typical learning objective what types of tasks are researchers in this this discipline frequently trying to accomplish and base your guide around that it's fine to make that guide a little bit longer break it out into sub pages so you can send people to a specific page of that guide but that is that is much more challenging but I'm still an advocate of thinking in terms of of learning objectives when you're basing the structure of that guide and the content of that guide as you will not be surprised to hear I really am a big proponent also of cutting down too much information off your guide cutting down avoiding too much information as a phrase day here a good way to do it one way to do that is to do what they call chunking which just means breaking down the content into pieces that are easy to learn and easy to digest and in short just not having too much don't make your pages too long that's all it means break your guide down into multiple pages and that is easier to digest easier to take in and understand for your learners and when I say keep links to a minimum we're often tempted to include every possible database that we think might be useful for this assignment instead of including 10 database links on your guide page include the two that you think are going to be definitely useful cut the other ones out and if you really feel like you need to you can always link to here's a page with more help but keep the immediate offerings short concise and definitely useful for the for the assignment so in other words we want to reduce choices because too many options are going to overwhelm students especially novice researcher this is what I just said minimize distraction minimize digressions minimize clutter on your pages keep your pages short and by that I mean vertically short and minimize extraneous information cut out anything that you don't think is really going to be critical so this is a little bit more about addressing the information need and when I talk when I started talking about cutting out the the welcome page thinking like your students think what are your students going to be looking for when they come to your guide what are they going to understand as as useful information on a guide and what are they going to sort of just skim over one thing that we do often is organize our guides by format and what I mean by that is a lot of guides are going to have a page for finding books a page for finding articles a page of web links to what you know links to websites that makes sense to us because as librarians that's how we classify information we treat information sources differently based on whether they are a serial or a monograph based on whether they are a peer review journal or a popular source based on whether it's a web link or an article students often don't care about that at all they are looking for where am I in this task and what do I need to accomplish and again that goes back to basing the guide structure on the assignment and on the task what I really like to do is get a copy of the assignment literally the assignment that's given to the students by the professor and compare okay what are they what steps are they going to need to go through and I will look at my guide based on what I think from my experience that students are going to have to accomplish and see if I were a student could I locate where I needed to be in this guide based on this assignment another thing is to really right for your audience and by that I mean choose your terminology based on who you think your audience is if your audience as mine usually is if your audience is college undergrads really avoid librarian jargon avoid mentioning catalog records avoid mentioning oh anything that you think students are going to have trouble recognizing that's to jargon e if the professor gives you an assignment for students where he is referring to you need to find academic journal articles call them academic journal articles on your guide that's what I mean by consistent terminology don't call them peer reviews is because students may not have that mental connection yet keep your text conversational it's fine to say I recommend this for you address them in the second person refer to yourself in the first person it can really help put a novice researcher at ease it's not always possible to do this but it can be really helpful to get a colleague whose guides you like to take a look at your guides and say hey does this make sense to you the way I've laid this out I I can't possibly do that for every guide my colleagues would kill me but it's helpful to do once in a while hey what would you do different from here I'm gonna talk a little bit about what I mean by concise text and scannable text in a minute but but again keep your text brief keep the language clear so that if somebody is just skimming over the page that can spot what they need that's all I mean by that annotations link annotations database link annotations pay attention to those if I'm linking to the database America history in life on one of my guides I am never in a million years going to just copy the link off my databases page copy the description off my library's databases page and paste it into my guide there is going to be so much library jargon in there that would scare off an undergrad I've got an example of this in a minute but so much of our our database so many of our database links on our library websites are just paragraphs of marketing copy written by the vendor that mean nothing to students write an annotation for your links and by that I'm I think everybody knows what I mean just the text that accompanies that link if I've got a link that says America history in life what I want to write to accompany that is just a sentence that explains here is how you use this for this assignment here is what you should be using this for use this in part one of your assignment where you have to find articles for your lit review it may be helpful for you to use this advanced search setting that's what I'm talking about and do not just copy and paste the vendor vendor written marketing copy that says this database contains primary sources of blah blah blah students aren't always going to recognize that just think about what are they going to need to know in order to use this resource that you're linking them to that's all there is to it my brains don't really yeah we do have a couple questions about that about the information for your audience specifically for the students someone does have a question which I think you just answered with your description right now about linking and the annotations that they were concerned that linking how did you feel about linking to discovery services this too much information for undergraduates to sort through yeah I do recommend our discovery service all the time to undergrads and I do mention it mention to them that you're going to have that problem too much stuff coming back and it's hard to sort through what I'll usually do if if I feel like what I'll usually do I feel like on my guides it's a good place to link them to something that's more discipline specific that they might not find on their own so I often I often omit a link to our discovery service but if I do link to it I will usually say this is a good fallback position if you can't find anything remember you can be very specific when you're searching and we just call ours discovery it's good to like point them don't don't just jump them into the whole ocean to flail around and them directly to the specific database or section that it relates to whatever assignment they're trying to work on that is my approach and I think a lot of the time our students are just going to our discovery service and not getting into the databases if they're just out there on their own so I feel like the research guides a good place for me to promote some more discipline specific resources that they wouldn't find otherwise so so I tend to do that first and then but then if I feel like you know maybe I need to include this I will mention specifically if you can't find anything else try this but you may you may get too much irrelevant stuff back so be very specific you can back out to a farther point but be aware of what might happen give them that warning yeah yeah sorry go ahead go ahead you want to finish you giving it's that's a good example of what I'm talking about though give them some context in the annotation here is how I think you should use this here is how I your research expert think you should use this specific link and then some advice based on the fact that they'll probably get too many results back right yeah of course someone else comments I agree about creating guides for students although some of it sounds like too much hand-holding for students why not talk about peer review for example yeah absolutely and when I say don't mention peer review all I mean is make sure that you're using terms that they are going to recognize terms that you know that your instructor that you the the course instructor has used with them my point being if if the instructor has given them an assignment that calls it academic journal articles and I say here's where to find peer review source of peer reviewed sources they may not have that mental connection it's fine to use the term no but right exactly they may not know that they may not know the terminology so use terminology that that you know they're going to be familiar with from class is my point and it's fine to absolutely fine to include some explanation like you know these are also called peer reviewed sources or whatever I said it's fine to to explicate that a little bit but point being make sure that there are going to be some words on the page that they will recognize and it's going to vary from guide to guide depending on what your instructors or the class or the resource or are is yeah absolutely true and that that speaks to the need for good communication with the instructor and it speaks to the need for really having a good handle on the assignment and the information need and the specific context in order to make the best possible guide I believe absolutely yep right good sure let me talk very briefly about writing on the web writing for writing effective text for the web is different from writing effective text for the printed page you can see this quote here this is from a user study of some research guides the student had most librarians are not aware of the fact that you need to write differently on the web in order for readers to take in the text effectively again I've been harping on this point about minimal text let me see my notes for this I'm not going to read you all of these bullet points because you can see that and some of these I've covered but just be aware that web readers are going by that I mean anybody using we reading text on a web browser they're going to be skimming for what they need they're going to just visually skim through the page and look for terms that they recognize or useful information again that that gets back to that jargon information seekers do not read a web page start to finish keep your text really short you'll see recommendations to cut your text by 75 percent if you're writing it on the web that's hard to do but it's good to strive for make sure that you've got I'll show you what I mean by above the fold but basically that just means high up on the page the most important information should be high up on the page you don't need to say click here when you're putting a link if you see that blue text you know that's a link blue underlined text and a couple of a couple of good style guides there that I recommend there are lots of them out there this is just a super simple example of what I mean by cutting your text down and making it skimmable I've got click here as my underlined blue link text that underlined blue is a it's a link but be it's also something that the eye is drawn to and if all of your links on a page say click here click here click here it's very hard for the eye to distinguish them I've got some terms in here like access that don't really doesn't really mean much I've got the word database that might or might not mean something to a student what I did in the second line here is I just cut it cut the words by about 50% I've added some terms some active verbs like search like find secondary sources I'm assuming that students need to students will recognize that term from class discussions and I've made America history in life I've made that title into the link so that when they click on that it reinforces to them this is the name of the thing that I'm linking to very simple and this is again I could have maybe shown you a longer example that that would be a little clearer but super simple to make some changes that make the text a little readable I was talking about making your text your pages vertically shorter this is an eye tracking study that was done the most important information needs to be what we call above the fold on the page and that just means the first screen of the page before you page down I think this third image here on the right is maybe the most the clearest example of that readers tend to skim across to the right and they tend to skim downward to look for what they need this stuff down here at the bottom is barely getting looked at the stuff the navigational stuff over here on the left is barely getting looked at the stuff that's in the top left corner and right from there and down from there is what's getting the most attention from readers so be aware of that it's better to have multiple short pages than it is to have one long page because this the stuff at the bottom may not get seen and this is all part of a web design principle called user experience which basically just means make your pages attractive to look at make them clean make it easier for your user to understand what is on the page so if they're spending less time looking figuring out what goes where on the page and less time figuring out how to navigate they have more mental energy I call it mental bandwidth here they have more attention basically to pay to what you're looking at here I don't know what this image means I found it when I was doing a search for images and put in user experience and I really liked the line at the reference desk there well darn I was hoping you would explain that that this is maybe some motto or something that I've never heard of before no I just really liked that I was like well I have to use this I didn't even look at a second choice for that one really super simple example of how I reworked one of my guides here and I am conscious of the time so I'll go through this a bit quickly but I got rid of the start here page I got rid this is the old version I got rid of the find articles and find books page there's a page here that you can't see because there's a drop-down menu about distinguishing scholarly from popular sources and there's a for you to look at later if you really want to see it I got rid of some text I had a lot of content that went past the fold as well this is not a perfect guide but here's an improved version you can see here I've got tabs back selecting your topic basically some background research doing a literature review and then they have to do a case study so I've got sources for finding litter lit review on this second page I've got some sources for the case study and I've got what I consider the less important stuff the APA style guides there for reference the Zotero guide is there for reference there's less text it's less blocky text I've got more bullet points there's a lot more that I could cut from here as well there really is a lot the looking at it now that that I could cut down here if I chose to and what else did I do to it I've got some bullet points on my next slide I really tried to base this around the assignment as I've been talking about and made the text more concise that's really the most important thing librarians are not really visual designers again the human eye takes in information on a web page differently than it does on a print page and I've already talked about a few things that we can do to help web readability and these other things I've said already really keep keep your pages simple keep them consistent from page to page so that people don't again simplicity makes the page more usable and once somebody has figured out how to use a page on your guide they should not have to refigure it out on every page some consistency across pages is very helpful visual design really makes a big difference for how users are taking in your guides and how they're likely how it's likely to affect whether they use it again this is a graph from a user study I think it's the same one about how the guide made the student dizzy I think this is the same study if I'm remembering correctly but that blue bar number one characteristic that students praised on a guide simple and clean layout made them more likely to go back and use the guide they said or why they would choose one over another second place is a tie for concise and clear annotations and interestingly search features which I didn't really talk about in this presentation but search features students appreciate that not having to go out to a yet another link to find resources here's an example of one of my guides again there is a lot wrong with this guide it's too busy but what I do want to call your attention to is a couple of design elements here one is the the color scheme I've got some red text here the only place that I'm using color much at all is this red text and it really pops out because the rest of it is such a simple color scheme it's kind of a busy page but the color scheme doesn't deviate much from black and white with some blue accents and so that red text pops out because the rest of it is so simple and so content the farther away that you get from black and white the more complicated the design gets and the harder it is for people to find what they need but if you're doing just a very simple color scheme on your guide just some simple emphasis some bold or a simple color choice like that can make a big difference the other thing is I'm going to talk about images a little bit and how that affects the guide the probably the first thing you notice and probably where your eye keeps going back to is this weird machine man one because it's at that top left position that we saw from the eye tracking study but it's also an area of high contrast on the page it's also a really weird image that really draws the eye so your eye tends to go there and hover there for a second or two and what is probably happening if a reader were actually looking at this guide is there I go straight there excuse me and then it does that f-shape to the right so it's going to go straight to this text and I think it's likely to go here to books articles newspapers rather than looking at my welcome text up here at the top partly because that that contrast partly because he's got this weird horn thing on his head and he is actually looking there and that draws the attention secondary point of focus might be that picture of me on the right here's another example of that we call this a focal area or an entry point that's where your eye goes naturally the eye does not naturally start on a text area on the screen the eye naturally going I'm saying the eye I'm talking about the attention of the reader I do have an actual eye picture photo of the an eye on here and that's probably where your eyes going if you want to see where the focal points on your page where what if you want to see what places on your guide page are likely to attract the reader's attention first squint at the page so that the text blurs out and you'll probably see the text just turns into a gray blob what does not totally blur out is these high contrast areas that's usually images here's one here's a secondary one again top left is always going to be a focal point an entry point on the page and then maybe to this text this bold text here on the right probably the last page that the eye is going to go to this text but if I've got fewer focal points on a page remember that F shape the eyes going to go to the reader's attention that is to clarify the readers attention is going to go to that focal point and then probably right and down from there so let's I'm getting close to the end here I want to talk a little bit about what you might call an institutional style guide and a lot of libraries have these guidelines for guide authors the content of what you're putting in your guide matters a lot more but what really can affect how your users use this content is whether your guides are consistent readable familiarity if they look at one guide and can recognize another guide because the structure is similar the design is similar that helps a lot and a consistent visual style does that if you are creating guidelines for your guide authors keep them simple and flexible because your guides need to meet a lot of different needs a history guide does not have the same audience as a biology guide a history class is not going to have the same types of information needs as a an art and design class keep in mind that your librarians your guide authors need to have some flexibility I've worked at a couple of libraries where we've tried to have templates for people and you know there needs to be a page of find articles and there needs to be a page of find books that doesn't really work in the long run it's fine to have some content guidelines as far as visual style goes we have had to from time to time have had to reign in guide authors who were doing some very creative things with fonts and colors that were affecting the readability of the guide but really this is the most important thing to keep in mind this is a quote from a colleague of mine that really says it better than anything that I could come up with I think that it says that once somebody has used one of your guides they shouldn't have to think about it again they should recognize the visual structure they should know what is going to be where in very general terms but there's plenty of room for flexibility of content in there so I'm going to wrap up with five minutes to go I'm not going to linger on the recommended reading list here this is just for your later perusal if you're interested in these are some of my favorite sources that I've come across in the course of doing this research and I will Chris I will send you the slides afterwards we've got just a couple of minutes left I do want to mention my book as I said I would it's called modern pathfinders creating better research guides it's from ACRL you can get it from the ALA store or of course Amazon or any of your better book retailers but if you're interested in the e-book edition I recommend getting it from the ALA store because they'll have a an edition without any DRM on it you can use on any device thank you very much nice happy to take a few minutes of questions if people can hang around a little bit yeah absolutely it's about five of five to eleven here central time so we do have time left in our official hour but if we do go along we will just stay on until everybody's questions are answered if you do need to take to leave because you only a lot at an hour for this not a problem or recording you always come back later and watch recording and catch all the questions we had we do have some questions actually a couple of questions about accessibility issues which I don't think you didn't I don't believe you mentioned yeah someone's using the generic term click here another reason why it's not a good thing to do is also confusing for an individual using a screen reader click here doesn't identify what the link goes to so it doesn't it's not very helpful to people who are using those kind of assistive devices I do not claim to be an accessibility expert of any kind and I that is actually new information to me and I wish I'd known that actually when I was writing my my book I would have mentioned that that is yeah that's a great point my expertise as far as other things like screen readers and so on I do know my experience as I said is is with LibGuides and I know LibGuides is is pretty well known for responsive design and being pretty well ADA accessible that is my understanding somebody else with more expertise in accessibility issues may have more comment on that it I know it is important I know it is something that I've I have not looked at very school really since web design class that I took in library school and there's a lot a lot in technical terms there's a lot that you can do to make guides disability accessible but I certainly don't claim any any particular expertise in that so what else I can say about that also then this other question might not be something you have anything that you could speak to someone wants to know if red the color red should be avoided because of the prevalence of color blindness is that some look into I have heard yeah I have read that also that red and blue can cause problems with colorblind readers I don't actually use a lot of red emphasis text I tend to use bold as opposed to a color to emphasize text on a page I think in general though it's it's a good idea to be very conservative with your use of colored fonts what I can say about that I can't speak to the the color blindness specifically any more than any more than that but I will say that the again I mentioned this briefly the farther you get away from a color scheme of black text on a white page the farther you depart from that the less readable in general your guide is going to be I like I said I do workshops where I'm working with people over the course of a few weeks on designing guides and when I see people designing funky color schemes there's nothing wrong with putting some color into your guides you know if you want to do sort of pale yellow background or pale blue background you know something that fits in with the rest of your your website that's just fine typically black text is the way to go because the farther away from that you get the more you risk it looking really weird on the page and and I think color blindness can be an issue yeah and a lot of times that kind of thing is not going it's going to vary from monitor to monitor and computer to computer people looking at your page and browser to browser people looking at your page are not necessarily going to see that same color shade the same way you do and something something that looks just perfect and then someone else on their own computer somewhere looks at it and goes oh my gosh why did they do that that's that's just hideous well and that that speaks to a more general point of try your try your guides out in a variety of resolution monitors different shape monitors and some different devices if you've got access to a tablet and of course we've all got smartphones look at your guide on a smartphone see how it looks I don't think a lot of our users are using them on on mobile devices but it's worth checking because I know that some of them are yeah for sure smartphones I think are harder because the screen size but tablets now I know I use my tablet for doing a lot of reading of websites and things now yeah yeah absolutely and even just some different resolutions yeah yeah another question oh wait yes there was another one I'm sorry I got confused with my list here can you recommend any free resources for creating guides oh boy by that do you mean like a free content management system or free like guides to creating guides I don't know if you mean like a free platform to create guides on or or instructional or instruction instructional material yeah yeah can can you clarify do what do you want do you want a free place to have to do guides in or do you just want some as far as a free sort of platform I have seen libraries that use open source there there are a couple of open source content management systems if you've got the support to install them I mean I've seen guides for that matter I've seen guides built on Google sites I've seen guides built on wiki software you know whatever frankly you don't have to purchase a separate content management system she says I've heard I've used live binders but would like to hear of others I'm not familiar with that those are a couple of other ones that I have seen used and you know really whatever content management system a lot of librarians it seems like since the rise of lib guides a lot of librarians seem to feel like we need a separate content management system to build our guides in and that's not necessarily the case a guide can simply be a web page on your existing library website the downside is often that they're harder to use and you don't want to have you know you don't want your instruction librarians to to have to learn you know a difficult content management system just to build guides and I think that's why LibGuides is so popular because it is easy to use you need minimal technical knowledge but as I said any basically any platform that you can build a web page on live guides has some features that are specifically designed with libraries in mind but you can apply these principles just you know with notepad and an HTML editor if there are other CMSs that people want to mention or other other guide systems that you're using I'm drawing a blank on one of there's an open source one and I'm completely drawing a blank on the name of it after talking for an hour but there there are open source systems that that you know are like LibGuides but free but you would need to to install it on your own server wordpress I think would work perfectly well as a content management system for guides whatever your library is using yeah excuse me I did look up that that with live binders it's a it's a digit it's organized your resources and like an online binder for content creation it describes itself as your digital organize your resources and online digital binders so similar to yeah like a LibGuides I think but online you've got business education sex specific session sections so I'll include a link to it people are yeah yeah I will actually take a look at that that's new to me it sounds like it might lend itself well to as a guides platform I will take a look at that yeah similar all right other other questions I know doesn't let anybody have any last minute we're a little past 11 o'clock so if anybody has any last-minute urgent questions they want to ask of Jason before we go get them typed in right away we just have a few of them you know thanks and someone says I impressed with this program I'm getting so many good ideas for the things I do earlier when you're talking about just the regular design and UX issues in general not even just specific to doing you know your guide your research guides there's more in the book I'm just saying and bibliographies in the book so yes yes look like anything's coming in so I think yeah if you do need more information like I said this is being recorded it'll be posted you'll have this will have the slides and that has that there were those resources on there and I will go through those and link to any of them as I can as well we keep all our links together in our delicious account here at the library commission so I will grab anything that was linked to or mentioned that's will website type will be included later on as well thank you so much Krista for the invitation thank you Nebraska Library Commission thank you all for coming and I'm really pleased that we had such a great turnout and terrific questions thank you all so much yeah thank you very much Jason alright I'm going to pull back control to my screen here now wait for it to show up there we go alright so yes that will wrap it up for this week's edition of Encompass Live as I said we recorded and this is our Encompass Live homepage you can actually just Google Encompass Live and you'll find it apparently we're the only thing being called that so far yay but right here beneath our upcoming shows is a link to our archives on this is where we have actually all of our archives going back to the very beginning of the show which was January 2009 so if you want to watch some old things go on here and check them out this was last week's just like this one from last week we'll have a link to the recording on our YouTube account a link to Jason's slides you're gonna send them to me then right and I'll put them up and I'll be happy to of course we'll put them up there and then all any links I collected which I can see I've started over here and delicious redesigned itself since I did this last week whoa grabbing any of the links that are related to today's show will all be included there most likely by later this afternoon that will be available just takes turns and how long it takes for things to process through YouTube when that is available I will send an email to everyone to let you guys know that it's ready to watch and share other than that I'll help you join us next week when our topic is summer reading summer reading programs coming up for all you public libraries Sally Snyder who is our coordinator of children's and young young adult library services here the Commission is going to do her annual look at book talks about titles to use for this year's program themes which are sports gaming related on your mark get set read for children and get in the game read for teens so I definitely sign up for that and any of our other upcoming shows we have here got our March in the start of our April sessions listed will be adding more as they all get finalized so keep checking back also if you are on Facebook big Facebook user we do have a Facebook page I do post here reminders of when a show starting here's one for this morning when I posted this morning saying hey log in and when a recording is available I also posted on here as well so if you are a big user of Facebook do pop over there and like our and compass live page other than that that wraps it up for today thank you very much and we will see you next week on and compass live bye bye