Best Practices for Subject/Course/General LibGuides at USF

• Libguides should not be published while under construction, or without content.
• Make use of the LibGuides link checker feature periodically (at a minimum annually) to ensure that all your links are active. See below for instructions.
• Guide authors should continue to monitor new and changed resources for inclusion in their guides.  Keep the guides in mind whenever a new database (or a link change) is announced, when new editions of books (especially reference books) become available; etc.  
• Promptly remove database links to resources that we no longer subscribe to.
• If a guide is no longer relevant or was created for a class that is no longer taught then consider changing its status to private or unpublished. A private guide is accessible to anyone with the guide URL will still have access to it. Unpublished guides are hidden from all users.
• To change the status of a guide, use the menu at the top right of the guide:

• Choose a guide status:

How to generate a broken link report

1.       Log into Libguides

2.       Under the Tools menu, choose Link Checker

3.       The link checker will automatically build a report for all links on all libguides, regardless of owner. You can find your links by typing you last name into the box below Owner

4.       Once you have a list of the broken links associated with each libguide, you can click on the Mapping Count link to see a list of which libguides contain that link.

5.       The URL is hyperlinked so you can check to see if the link still works. If you need to edit the link click in the edit box in the asset column.

6.       That will open the form for the asset where you can change the link URL.

7.       Sometimes links show up on the broken link report that are not broken (there are several reasons this may happen). If you confirm that a link still works, you can then exclude it from the report. That way, it won’t keep showing up in your broken link report. To exclude a link, click on the little box with the + sign to the left of the ID number.

Creating an HTML Back up for a Guide

It can be helpful to occasionally create backups of your guide. Although these HTML backups cannot be used to restore deleted content, they can help you to recreate it. Backups are automatically created when a guide is deleted. However, you can create one at any time by doing the following:

1. While editing your guide, click on the Guide Information () menu.
2. Under BACKUP/EXPORT, select Create HTML Backup.
3. The backup will be automatically generated and a confirmation message will appear. Click the Download HTML Backup link to download it right away.
   1. A copy will also be available under Tools > Data Exports > Guide HTML.

Requesting an XML Back up for a Guide

You can request an export of your guide in XML format, which is useful if you need to index your guide's content in a discovery layer or institutional repository. Because these files will appear as XML markup, they aren't ideal for making readable backups of your guides. Instead, we recommend creating an HTML backup of your guide.

1. While editing your guide, click on the Guide Information () menu.
2. Under BACKUP/EXPORT, select Request XML Export.
3. The request will be queued up and a confirmation message will appear. Click the Close button to continue.
   • Please allow up to 24 hours for your request to be processed by our server.
   • You'll receive a notification email once your XML file is ready, with a link to the Data Exports page where you will be able to download it.