Article on Content Strategy in the LibGuides Content Management System

 The January 2021 issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship includes an article entitled Content strategy in LibGuides: An exploratory study.

LibGuides is a content management system (CMS) that is very popular with libraries in all sectors. My place of work uses it.

The article analyzes results from a survey of American academic libraries that were using the LibGuides platform in Fall 2019 in order to find out what content guidelines they had adopted.

From the highlights:

• Nearly half of reporting institutions do not have content guidelines for their LibGuides.
• Guidelines focused more on structural and clearly definable aspects of LibGuides.
• After guides are published, few institutions review them systematically.
• Most often, published guides are reviewed by their authors on an ad hoc basis.

From the conclusion:

"Findings indicate that half of responding institutions had content guidelines which focused on easily quantifiable aspects of guides such as their design, title, and type. After publication, guides were reviewed ad hoc and most often for currency and accuracy. Authors largely govern their own content throughout its lifecycle. This implies that where LibGuides are concerned, most academic libraries continue to operate under a distributed content authorship model. Though content guidelines are common and evoke content strategy, without external governance or workflow oversight there is little recourse if a content-author misapplies the guidelines. Lack of governance does not indicate lack of knowledge or interest in governance, but competing priorities and time pressures may impede good intentions (...)"

"When a LibGuides system bears institutional branding and web domains, users experience it as part of the web space and may not even know that they are interacting with a different CMS. If institutions are proceeding from a user-first standpoint, LibGuides should be considered part of the library's and institution's overall web presence and held to the same standards regardless of who contributed the content. Having a unified content strategy can ensure that all content on the library's web spaces are useful and usable as McDonald and Burkhardt (2019) advocate. Academic libraries may therefore benefit from engaging with content-authors to develop an organizationally appropriate governance structure for their LibGuides content."