Libguides best practices

We got Libguides! Hooray! Our completely blank Libguides webpage is hanging out in cyberspace waiting to be populated. One of the key things I've picked up from people who have implemented Libguides before us (score one for being a late adopter!) is to implement them thoughtfully. For other Project Runway fans, I think it's like using the accessory wall thoughtfully.
Our action plan right now is as follows:
1. Usability testing
2. Develop templates
3. Create boxes that other librarians can copy or link to.
4. Train train train.
5. Implement
Since I'm a librarian, I immediately headed to the Google to find out what others have done. I found (no big surprise here) some great stuff from other libraries. Here's some of my favorite stuff:

• Focus groups and simple usability tests at the University of Michigan- great ideas for questions and some starting points for our usability tests
• Templates: University of Louisville, Hillsborough Community College, Northwestern University
• Linked boxes: Ohio University (this one is amazing)
• Best practices: Hillsborough Community College, Cornell

Lots of fun stuff to look over as we start down this path! And there's still that self-study to consider.

Libguides

This is a slight aside from my usual ramblings about information literacy, but my library is considering adopting Libguides. Right now, we make a static webpage for each class we see (here's one of mine for this semester), to the tune of about 1000 webpages. In an attempt to lessen our workload, increase our flexibility (right now, we're unable to edit pages unless we're at our work computers), and take up less server space, we decided to take a look at Libguides. Of course, the coolest thing about Libguides is the ability to pull in RSS feeds, tag stuff, and create polls. All this sounds great, though the prospect of migrating all these pages makes my head spin a bit. Luckily (?), our whole library website will be moving to a CMS soon, so it's not a matter of moving vs. not moving, but more a matter of where we'll be moving. Either way, sounds like a fun summer project!

Can tutorials help prevent plagiarism?

According to Brian Jacob and Thomas Dee, they apparently can. This blog post on the Freakonomics blog (which I love) says that students who took a plagiarism tutorial before submitting papers plagiarized less frequently than those who didn't. The effect was stronger among students with lower SAT scores.
I am really excited about this study. In addition to the program self-study, our research tutorial is another project of mine. Our Distance Education Librarian, Beth, and I are overhauling it. We started with the plagiarism part. Check it out (it requires Flash). It's great to know that, at least in one case, a plagiarism tutorial was actually helpful.