Next month, I’m planning to teach a workshop for non-librarian faculty on how to use LibGuides. This will be a first for me. LibGuides is a very library-focused tool, and I am curious to see how it goes over with non-librarians.

On the one hand, LibGuides is a very accessible, general-purpose CMS that would seem to have many use cases, much like WordPress. On the other hand, it also has a lot of library-specific tooling built in, which may (perhaps?) alienate non-librarian users. Non-librarians are probably not usually going to want to “add a book from the catalog” or “add a database”. The question is whether they will be willing to look past these features to see it as a general-purpose CMS. I suppose librarian-specific features can be easily ignored, but people also usually expect their software to be aimed specifically at their use case. So the question is: if there are some irrelevant (from their perspective) features, will non-librarians engage with the platform?

We’ll see what happens in the workshop! I will try to report back soon.

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