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ResearchGuide is an open-source software application that helps librarians make subject guides and information pages about themselves using Web forms.

May 11, 2008
News
•  2/2006: Update on ResearchGuide implementations
•  2/2006: Australian adaptation of ResearchGuide
•  2/2006: ResearchGuide at Spain's Universitat de Lleida
•  2/2006: Updated contact information

A gentle introduction

Consider the fictitious librarian Marcus Aurelius, a subject specialist in Classics at a university library. With ResearchGuide, Marcus and his colleagues can create guides to resources in various subjects by entering the information in web forms. They can also create specialist pages with contact information and other background information on subject specialists in the library. First let's take a look at the guides to resources.

1. Guides

Let's say Marcus wants to create a Guide to Classical Studies. He can create custom categories such as Reference Works, Indexes to Articles and Web Resources. Within each category, he can add as many resources as he wishes including URLs where appropriate. Once information has been entered, users may access the research guide as a web page.

2. Specialist pages

ResearchGuide also allows Marcus to create a specialist page. This page includes contact information, a photo (if he wishes), responsibilities, and educational background. Any guides that Marcus creates will appear as links from this page, allowing users to navigate directly to guides in Classics, Law, Philosophy, or other subjects. Conversely, from any one of these guides, users may navigate back to the specialist page about Marcus since each guide has a link to its maintainer near the bottom.

The application is thus an environment for fluid navigation among research guides and specialist pages. The application also dynamically generates a list of all subject guides and a list of all specialist pages.

3. Administrator's interface

The heart of the application is the web-based interface for creating and editing guides and specialist pages. A demo version of ResearchGuide has a "sandbox" administrator's interface. Feel free to try editing one of the guides, or creating your own (under "Administer guides").

This application was written for use at the University of Michigan Graduate Library. It is currently being used to serve research guides there.

As of September 6, 2003, we have also learned of live implementations at Wayne State University Library System and Old Dominion University Libraries.

This is free software

Because many libraries seem to face the challenge of maintaining subject resource guides, we sought, and got, permission to make this application available under an open-source license. Thanks to the University of Michigan Graduate Library for agreeing to this.

In considering whether to use ResearchGuide you should be aware of these caveats.

You can download the source code here.

If you decide to use this application, are interested in participating as a developer, or have questions, please e-mail the project administrator at:

kslibner "at" users.sourceforge.net

See credits for more about how this application was developed.