Over the past few months, I’ve been diligently restructuring and updating the Water Research Guide.
For those who are unfamiliar with research guides, they are online tools intended to help people find information on a particular topic. This means pointing people in the right direction for scholarly articles, books, newspapers, websites, and other credible sources on anything they might be interested in.
As the Wisconsin Water Library, we’re tasked with creating a research guide covering water. This might sound simple, but take a minute to look around you. How many things in your line of sight involve water, either because they are water, they contain water, they were produced using water, they will end up in the water after you throw them out… the list could go on! Water influences nearly every aspect of humanity, including the existence of life itself!
Capturing the multifaceted and interdisciplinary nature of water in one research guide was no small task, but I was lucky to have other students before me who built the structure. This meant that most of my work was focused on four areas:
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- Determining what content is most relevant for water-information-seekers today
- Establishing a consistent layout that makes it easy to find resources either by type of resource (website, article, book) or by topic of interest (aquaculture, pollutants, invasive species)
- Ensuring we include resources for our non-UW-affiliated users – including job-seekers, citizen scientists, and educators – because the Wisconsin Water Library serves patrons far beyond the Madison campus
- Finding a way to keep everything current without requiring a staff member to check in on the guide more than twice a year
This guide was my first foray into creating educational library materials that aren’t geared toward a specific user, course, or topic. Shifting my mindset to a more holistic view of water science while still providing detailed information was a welcome challenge. I loved analyzing our existing resources and patron needs to come up with a layout and content that do the intricacies of water science justice!
Now on to the next project!
[cover photo: “Sand in the Waves,” Lexie, 16. Northwest Passage, Ltd.]