Downloadables Guides

After starting at the Tulsa City-County Library in the Fall of 2017 as a Customer Care Specialist, I learned that one of the areas that the department was responsible for was the LibGuides for downloadable materials. Given my experience with the LibGuides system, I volunteered to take on the task of updating the guides.

Starting Out

The original downloadable LibGuides were not very user-friendly. There were too many tabs and the information they contained wasn’t always up-to-date. The first step of this project was to evaluate the guides themselves and see what needed to be updated. I had a small team of coworkers assisting me on this project and decided that I would create a project through Office 365 where each person would assign themselves a platform device combo to review and edit and then upload.

A Hitch in the Plan

When I started this project, LibGuides was the system that the library was using for all of it’s resource guides. Given my experience with the platform, I thought the project wouldn’t take too long to finish. However partway through the process of updating all of the different guides, I learned that the library would soon be getting a new website and as part of this, we would be discontinuing the LibGuides. This shift required some major rethinking of how the guides were going to be presented. As a part of this I attended Website Content Editor training for our new website and restructured the guides so they would be friendly towards the new platform.

The final Product

Approximately 8 months after I started work on this project, the new and improved guides were uploaded to the new website. They are currently in use by the patrons of Tulsa City-County Library, and I have created a sustainable system of keeping the guides up-to-date.