I’ve been working over the past few weeks at cleaning up LibGuides assets, and wanted to give you an update.
- Yesterday I had Springshare delete all the assets that were not databases that had zero mappings. Zero mappings means that the asset was not in any guide, whether published, unpublished, or private. The vast, vast majority of these were links created before 2010 that had been removed from guides over the years, but the asset lingered on. This removed 3500 assets frm the system, which should make it easier to find existing assets in the future!
- I’m also mapping all of the link assets that have been created for databases over to the database assets. Springshare gave me a spreadsheet so that I don’t have to manually map all the assets, but it’s still pretty time consuming. I am only mapping links to databases that are the same as the canonical link provided by ERMS: if you have created a special link to a database’s advanced search page, or to a specific volume within Annual Reports or Credo Reference, for example, I will not change your link. This is important so that we keep the statistics together, especially for databases that don’t proivide COUNTER data. It’s also important so that if a link changes, ERMS can update it in one place and be confident that all instances of that database have been fixed. Last week I realized that we had 27 Credo Reference links, only one of which is being managed by ERMS. If Credo ever changes it’s URL structure, then 26 of our links will be broken.
Even with these changes we have almost 14,000 assets, many of which are duplicates. I am looking into whether it makes sense to work on merging all the duplicates there, but that relies on effective governance of assets after the cleanup. As we know, the words “governance” and “LibGuides” don’t always go together. (☺) I’ll run this by the LibGuides committee this summer. Last time we decided it wasn’t worth the effort, but in the 2 years since that discussion we created 8,480 assets.
I’ll also be at the June R&I meeting to go over best practices for reusing assets rather than creating new ones, with a special focus on databases.
As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.