Help Guide Ask Us

The Subject Guides Review 2016 - Final Report and the Subject Guides Implementation 2017 - Final Report are available from the staff site.

My Account

Your My Account page is your personal portal into the Guides system and your public user profile (https://guides.lib.unb.ca/profile/jcarter1)

Logins require valid UNB credentials and an active Guides Builder account. Click "Login" in the footer of any page. Contact Jeff Carter to have accounts created.

From here, you can edit and determine which information to display in the sidebar of your guides and what information to have on your profile page.

Users will always be able to see your published guides listed, but when logged in you will also be able to see and navigate to your unpublished content.

This is also where you go to create a new guide or clone an existing one.

  Create a new guide Clone an existing guide

ALL Guides Builders are authors and editors.

That status relates to each particular guide you are associated with, i.e. you can be an author on one guide, an editor on another and have no status on yet another.

Authors

When you create a new guide, you become its Author (or owner). There can be ONLY one author per guide.

Only Authors can:

• delete a guide - if you are a guide's author you will see an admin function for Delete
• reassign authorship - when editing, Authors will see a special author section at the bottom. Here you can reassign your guide and rights to any other Guide Builder.

Editors

All Authors are also editors of a guide. There is no limit to the number of editors on a guide.

After the initial saving of your guide, you will also be listed as an editor. This allows you to order the editors in the sidebar.

Editors can:

• add, remove or hide additional guide editors, including yourself
• create and edit all tabs/sections
• publish/unpublish guides
• link courses for a guide

Public Access

All published guides are publicly accessible. Although there is a mechanism under Guide Metadata to suppress a guide from public listings, published guides will always appear on your Profile page.

Unpublished guides are only visible to their authors and editors.

When logged in, Guides Builders will only have admin function access to guides they author or have been assigned as an editor.

To create a new Guide go to your profile page and click either the   Create a new guide or the Clone an existing guide button at the bottom.

Your new guide will open immediately and you will be required to complete the Guide Metadata section.

On subsequent visits to your guide, this section is collapsed.

Guide Metadata

• Title - this can be of your choosing even for course-level guides, but should fit within our current standards and best practices
• Category - this will determine which category page your guide appears on under Detailed Guides, e.g. History. You can select only ONE category. There is a Miscellaneous category for guides which do fit within our primarily faculty/discipline driven categories.
• Related Categories - you can also assign your guide to multiple categories under the Related Guides section, e.g. Business. Be respectful to the primary editors in each category. We suggest you consult them first before pushing your guide out as related. This section is optional.
• Campus - this should be set in most all cases to the campus at which the primary author works. In special cases, e.g. The NCLEX, both campuses may be indicated. Setting a campus does not prevent any user from seeing or accessing the guide. It is used primarily for D2L linking and browse list filtering.
• Hide this guide on "All" list - this option allows you to suppress the listing of this guide on any browse or listing pages. As long as the guide is published, it will still be accessible and listed on your profile page.

Metadata for Course Guides

Above is the default guide metadata for any level. Course metadata is used for setting the guide as a specific course guide, i.e. HIST 2243 or adding extended D2L linking. This is managed separately through the Course Linking tab.

Guide Types & Status

Subject Guides - Primarily our system is used to deliver subject guides, aligned to a large degree with the faculties and disciplines across the two campuses. We currently have 40 subject/category/disciplines into which we group these guides. All are listed here: https://lib.unb.ca/. You must choose a category for you guide when you create it.

Topical or Non-Discipline Specific Guides - we have a large number of guides which fall outside of discipline-specific categorization. They are still considered subject-level guides. Examples include Mobile Resources for Academics, STU at HIL, Zotero, Archives and Special Collections, Government Documents, Agriculture, etc. These guides will all be part of the Miscellaneous category, but should be added to various category pages as Related Guides to increase their usage.

Course Guides - these are guides intended to represent a single course per campus, i.e. HIST*2432. You may further extend the granularity to include year, term and section, if required. Links in D2L will mirror the level of granularity set here.

Status Indicator

When logged in, a line of text in a blue box will appear just following the editor tabs informing you of the current guide's status.

Visual output for guide types is based on guide metadata AND link courses settings. You will see one of four guide types:

• guide will appear on the linked category page for History under the Detailed Guides listings

• guide will appear on the linked category page for History under the Detailed Guides listings
• each faculty with its own course calendar prefix will have a default guide for each campus used to match linking from D2L when no course guide exists

• guide will appear on the linked category page for History under the Detailed Guides listings
• has also been identified as a sub-discipline, e.g. History, Canadian. It can be configured to match a set of courses in D2L related to that sub-discipline
• configuring D2L matching is done via the Link Courses tab

• this guide is intended to be a course-level guide matching one specific calendar course on a campus
• it will appear on the linked category page for History under the Course Guides listings
• course guide configuration is done via the Link Courses tab

The guide will also indicate published/unpublished depending on its state.

If you are the author or editor of the guide, you will see an additional row of admin tabs, when viewing it. If you have no privileges on a guide, this row will not be present.

• View - publicly accessible guide content; hidden tabs will not appear here
• Edit - this is where all content changes are made
• Delete - only appears if you are the guides author; does what is says permanently and without impunity
• Revisions - allows you see all previous saved versions and roll back content to any of those revisions
• Link Courses - link your guide to specific courses in D2L or set this guide to be a specific Course Guide
• Guide Help - this is where you are now; feel free to suggest additions
• Best Practices - with a more open editor interface, we have created some best practices for content and design development
• My Account - also found in footer. Jumps back to your profile page and guide listings
• eResources Records - add, edit and delete custom (blue) resource records and check resource usage within guides

More Powerful Tabs

Clicking on the admin Edit function takes you into the core of the Guides Builder.

Content on a tab is virtually unlimited. Tabs can:

• be given any name you want of any length, but this can cause tab row wrapping
• be up to eight (8) in total (previously six)
• can be in any order you want, with the leftmost opening by default
• can include any content you desire; no longer prescribed
• include any number of widgets for eResources, WorldCat or Reference Universe
• be reordered at any time
• be hidden temporarily using the "Hide this section" option
• be deleted at any time
• can include embedded images and external streaming video
• can upload and link to local documents

Next Editing Your Tab Sections ...

Each tab has full HTML editor controls. By default, the editor functions with a visual/WYSIWYG toolbar. Controls similar to MS Word, but far fewer in number, are available to style and structure your content.

Standard Undo and Redo.

Highlighted text can be made bold and italisized. You can remove formatting and add colour to text. Insert blockquote and horizontal rule.

Add justification to paragraphs: left, centre and right.

Add or remove hyperlinks.

Insert a table (a dialogue will appear for setting the number of rows and columns as well as our Bootstrap formatting), a bulleted list, an ordered list. Add indent and outdent to paragraphs. Insert fancy themed button.

Odd little icon allows you to upload new or choose existing files in the file browser. Embed images. Embed streaming media. Attech files to highlighted text.

Set standard paragraph and heading styles.

Switch to fullscreen mode, Markdown editing mode and HTML source mode.

Footnotes

Insert page footnotes, which are autonumbered (by default),  and automatically anchored and linked to a generated list at the bottom of the page.

Saving
Note that the page must be saved to retain any changes made to a footnote item.

Inserting a new footnote
Place the cursor where you want the footnote number to appear. Press the Insert Footnote CKEditor toolbar button and the corresponding dialog window will display. Type whatever text you want into the Footnote text field, leaving the Value field blank. Press the dialog OK button to return to the editor.

Editing a footnote
Double-click the superscripted footnote you want to change within CKEditor. Make the desired text edit within the dialog window's Footnote text field and then complete the edit by pressing the OK button.

Deleting a footnote
Right-click the superscripted footnote you'd like to remove within CKEditor. Select Cut from the context menu. The footnote will be removed and the remaining footnotes will automatically be renumbered on page render, should they exist.

Adding a link within footnote text
The default basic toolbar for the Footnote dialog does not include a link button so links cannot be done via WYSIWYG. You may, however, manually add a link to a footnote using the CKEditor Source button (described above).

To add the link manually, move the cursor where you'd like the footnote number to appear and do not use the footnote button. Instead, type the footnote text within the editor and add your link using the HyperLink button. Next, switch to the editor source code mode by toggling the Source button, find your recently added footnote within the code and manually enclose the associated text and HTML link tag (<a> + </a>) with <fn> + </fn> tag.

Alternatively, you may enter the link as plain text within the Footnote field and then toggle the Source button to manually code the HTML link inside the corresponding <fn> tag.

Example:
… the change. <fn>This is my footnote containing a <a href="https://unb.ca">hyperlink</a>.</fn>

Standard guides do not require any editing in the Link Courses tab. They will appear on the appropriate category page based on the category selected in the guide metadata.

Three reasons you may need/want to add entries under Link Courses:

1. Course Guide for a Single Course
   • For a guide to become a course guide, it must minimally have the Course Prefix and Course Number entered.
   • Guides with course settings will appear under Course Guides on the category page and course browse lists.
   • More importantly, course guides will be linked directly from the UNB Libraries widget within D2L. If you entered BIOL 2124, any Biology 2124 course/section will resolve to this course guide.
   • You can define further granularity by defining Year, Term, and Section but this will limit the course linking to the scope defined, i.e. enter the year 2017 and 2016 sections will NOT link to this guide.
2. Default Guide for a Course Prefix
   • Each course in the UNB calendar must have a course prefix, e.g BIOL, PHIL or CHEM, to determine the faculty.
   • When no course guide exists to match a course in D2L, we fall back to the default guide for that prefix.
   • There can be two default guides per prefix but only one per campus.
   • To set a default guide for a prefix, simply enter the prefix only with no course number.
   • We have configured these globally already, so don't muck with these unless you know what you are doing.
   • The ONLY place this has any bearing is D2L linking.
3. Subject Guide for a Sub-Discipline

   • Some categories and faculties are further broken down by sub-disciplines, i.e. History, Atlantic World or History, Canadian.

   • These are easily found on the History categories page but we also want to link to them coming out of D2L.

   • The default behaviour, if there was no course guide, would be to fall back to the default History Guide - the one marked above with only HIST.

   • However, we already know HIST*1234, HIST*2345 and HIST*3241 are History, Canadian courses. By setting these values, we can force all these D2L courses to always link to our History, Canadian guide.

   • Guides marked up with two or more course links are considered sub-discipline guides; a single entry here makes it a course guide.

   • Never set Year, Term, and Section for linking of this type.

   • The ONLY place this has any bearing is D2L linking.

If you are uncertain as to whether you need to define any information here, it is best to leave well enough alone or contact Jeff for help.

Category Pages

The concept and design for these pages will remain essentially unchanged and each supports a custom URL, e.g. http://guides.lib.unb.ca/categories/history

Guide Lists

Detailed Guides

• All guides in a given category will appear as a Detailed Guide.
• A guide can be assigned to a category via the Guide Metadata.
• A guide can only appear in one category under Detailed Guides, but can be assigned to multiple categories as a Related Guide.

Course Guides

• Guides intended to represent a single course will appear under the Course Guides section.
• Use the Link Courses tab to assign the course and/or section values.

Related Guides

• Guides which have been marked as related will appear under the Related Guides.
• A guide can be set as related to one or several categories via the Guide Metadata.

Ask Us

ONLY publicly displayed authors and editors for Detailed Guides will appear under the Ask Us section. They are considered the primary contacts for this category/discipline.

Top eResources

In the old system, top eResources were calculated dynamically based on the rankings across all detailed guides.

Within our new system, however, you can have an unlimited number of eResources widgets per tab across all tabs in each guide (multiplied by all Detailed Guides in the Category). Due to the technical complexity, if not impossibility, these list rankings will no longer be dynamic. Instead, they are curated/ranked by the Guide Editors within that discipline.

Resource rankings are controlled through a widget similar to the eResources widget, but you will only be able to select resources that have been added to guides within the category.

Implications:

• this means editors should agree on the list and work together when edits are desired
• there would be maintenance to keep the list current if new resources are added
  • if we cancel resources, they would simply disappear without intervention
• editors would still order/rank resources in each list in their Guides
  • but no more gaming the system to try to influence the order on the category page
• initially, we have replicated what was on the previous category pages
  • then once live, folks can massage as desired
• the top resource selector widget on the category pages, will ONLY offer you a choice of resources selected in the detailed guides making selection easier
• under the new system, you can  also include blue/local records, if appropriate
• maximum number of "top" resources extended to 10, from 6
• we will still dynamically generate an All list of resources by category, but it will not be ranked.
  • Article & Research Databases for History - https://guides.lib.unb.ca/category/history/resources/databases