Structure and Hierarchy of LibGuides Content
Hierarchy
- Guide - All guides start with one page. You can add pages and subpages to your guide.
- Page / Subpage - Pages and Subpages contain boxes. You do not have to have subpages, but they allow for content organization. This guide uses Pages and Subpages.
- Boxes - A page has nothing on it until you add a box. There are different types of boxes, and you can have multiple boxes. The box title is the first header on your page, so it should be related to the name of the page.
- Content - These are the things you put on your guide. LibGuides calls these "assets", and there are different kinds of assets that can be used with different reasons for doing so.
Structure
LibGuides is built using Bootstrap's grid system, and each page is made up of columns and rows. The boxes will always be "read" top-down in column order, meaning that the left-most top box will be read first and everything else in that column before moving to the second column. This is especially evident in the tabbed guide layouts.
Create, Reuse, Copy
There are three ways to add content to a guide: create from scratch, reuse from another source, or copy from another source. LibGuides are meant to be shared, especially from within the same organization. There is no reason for every guide to have a different citation page when you can easily just reuse an existing citation page.
- Create - Starting with a completely blank slate, you can create your own guide, pages/subpages, boxes, and content assets.
- Reuse - You can reuse a page/subpage, box, or asset. This allows you to add something to your guide without having to maintain it everywhere. Reusing something creates a linked version on the page, meaning that you can not edit it on that guide (only the original owner or an admin can edit the item in the same way that if you shared a youtube video).
- Copy - You can make a copy of something, which will give you the option to then edit the thing you are reusing. You can do this if you want the layout of a page but need to adjust the specific content, or you want a lot of the content but want to customize the explanation.
