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LibGuides Author Manual

Instructions, guidelines, and best practices for creating and maintaining LibGuides at Rutgers University Libraries.

Tools

LibGuides offers a number of tools to help you get the most out of your content. You can access these by selecting Tools from the dashboard menu.

Widgets

Widgets allow you to embed LibGuides content on external websites to increase visibility and usage. Use widgets to generate a list of guides, subjects, or authors that you can easily embed on your blog or course website.

To create a widget:

  1. Click on Tools from the dashboard menu and select Widgets
  2. Choose the type of content you want to embed (e.g., a group of guides, a list of subject categories, a specific box or page, etc.)
  3. Use the display and filter options to customize your widget
  4. Copy and paste the Embed Code into your website

API

API stands for Application Programming Interface and it allows you to extract LibGuides content or reuse it in other applications. APIs are more flexible than widgets but also require more technical knowledge and coding skill.

Use APIs to program other applications to retrieve LibGuides data such as:

  • Guides - Data related to guides, guide pages, boxes, and metadata.
  • Accounts - Data related to accounts
  • Subjects - Data related to subject categories.
  • Assets - Data related to assets including links, books from the catalog, RSS feeds, and files.

Link Checker

Link Checker provides a weekly report of all broken links in the system.

To determine whether any links you have created are currently broken:

  1. Click on Tools from the dashboard menu and select Widgets
  2. Enter your last name under the column labeled Owner
  3. Click the edit button in the Action column to update the link
  4. Click Save

Tips for Checking Links

  • Reports are updated every Saturday.
  • Authors should use Link Checker at least once per semester to update any broken links.
  • Link Checker only checks URLs created using Link boxes. Any links created using Rich Text/HTML must be checked manually.
  • Link Checker occasionally reports false positives for the following reasons:
    • The website was actually down or busy at the time the link was checked.
    • The website is configured to refuse any connections from robots and web crawlers.
    • The website is incorrectly configured and returned the wrong response code.