In the past two weeks, I’ve been working on maintaining guides and also creating a new guide on Chicago citation style at the Gumberg Library. In my work to create a Chicago guide, Ted had me examine some existing guides that other university libraries had made on Chicago in hopes that we could recycle their material. This was a project I was excited about because I also work in the Writing Center, and citations are a frequent question students have. Navigating MLA, APA, or Chicago Citation manuals can be incredibly difficult, and online resources often aren’t comprehensive enough to answer every obscure question a student may have. After scouring over twenty different Chicago guides, I finally found a guide that I thought was both easy to navigate and had a wide array of citation examples for different kinds of sources. Something that we’ve been emphasizing throughout this internship is the importance of not having too much clutter on a webpage. I especially understood this looking at other guides on citations that over-explained how to plug information into a citation or just had a lot of information on one page with no clear focus. This is why we chose a guide with a side menu that served as a table of contents which used a hyperlink to jump to each source on the page. Creating this guide allowed me to learn many new technical skills for using the Libguides content management system. Additionally, I’m excited to have a resource that I know will be useful to many students as well as my colleagues at the Writing Center. It was incredibly rewarding to be able to use my knowledge and experience from the Writing Center to create this guide.
In the coming weeks, I will be working on the August Wilson guide as well as a guide on Simone Weil, which will involve me doing some research of my own. I’m excited to continue to work on developing research guides that I know will be useful to both current and future students.
Building Bridges 