Blazing Trails Through an Untamed Wilderness: Improving Your Library's Self-Guided Help

Abstract

Libraries provide self-guided help on their websites through FAQs, guides, and tutorials. This content, often created to meet immediate needs and located on multiple webpages, can become an untamed wilderness over time. A group of librarians at the University of Alaska Anchorage took a holistic approach to reflect on, re-envision, and renew our library’s online self-guided help in order to provide students with a more navigable path to research success. This group includes an instructional design librarian and four subject specialist librarians who have responsibility for a significant amount of library instruction, LibGuides, and other tutorials. When we realized the scope of the changes and the extent of the content we needed to edit and create, the project felt overwhelming, but by sharing our experience, we hope to empower others to blaze a trail to improve their own self-guided help. This paper will describe our project and process, lessons learned, and resulting impacts.