1.1: Note from the Author and Editor

Sarah Moukhliss

This workbook came to fruition based on my professional role and experiences as the STEM Online Learning Librarian at the University of North Florida (UNF). In this position, I split my time working as an online academic librarian in a traditional library setting and with the university’s Center for Instruction and Research Technology (CIRT) department. One of my jobs for CIRT is to be a trained and certified Quality Matters (QM) peer reviewer. QM is an internationally recognized non-profit organization dedicated to researching standards, procedures, and processes for online instruction. As a trained peer reviewer, I can assist with reviewing UNF online courses to check that they meet QM’s researched and vetted standards for online course design.

While conducting these rigorous reviews, I questioned why library guides did not receive the same attention as online course reviews. I questioned this at meetings with librarians and with instructional designers. Finally, I decided to build an assessment rubric. The rubric I created is a remix of the SUNY-Online Course Quality Review Rubric or OSCQR SUNY, which holds a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to re-use or remix the rubric, as long as the borrower gives proper credit back to the OSCQR-SUNY creators.

Subsequently, I published the LGAS Rubric for Quality-Checked Review library guide. This guide includes the LGAS rubric and points to a maintenance checklist timeline for reviewing guides after earning a quality-checked review status. The maintenance checklist is licensed under a Creative Commons license from the Vanderbilt University Library.

CC BY-SA https://libguides.unf.edu/LibraryGuideAssessmentStandards/. Your institutional team may consider referencing it on your own timeline.

I want to thank Kevin Hulen, Assistant Director for Quality and Assessment at the University of North Florida, for his invaluable feedback as I built this workbook. Additionally, I would like to thank Trina McCowan Adams, Director of Library Services at Flagler College, for supporting LGAS research, editing, and publishing this resource.

The LGAS Rubric in this workbook was remixed from the SUNY Online Course Quality Review Rubric or OCQR (Learn more at: https://oscqr.suny.edu/).

Trina McCowan Adams

This project grew out of a professional transition. After leaving my role as Assessment Librarian at the University of North Florida and stepping into the position of Director of Library Services at Flagler College, I carried two things with me that refused to stay behind: a deep commitment to meaningful assessment and a belief in the power of open educational resources.

Those commitments made it an easy decision to continue collaborating with Sarah on promoting the Library Guide Assessment Standards (LGAS) as a practical method for reviewing LibGuides. LGAS doesn’t just ask “Is this guide good?” It gives librarians a shared language and structure for talking about quality, accessibility, and usability in our online learning objects, drawing on frameworks like SUNY’s OSCQR rubric and the maintenance checklist model developed at Vanderbilt.

I also come to this work as a former graphic designer who unabashedly loves LibGuides. For me, they are the perfect marriage of design and the thoughtful transmission of information. A well-designed guide is not decoration. It is pedagogy, user experience, and equity of access all wrapped into a single interface.

As editor, my goal in working on this workbook has been to help make LGAS feel approachable, adaptable, and immediately useful, whether you are reviewing a handful of guides or building a sustained assessment program. I invite you to adapt, remix, and extend these materials in your own context so that, together, we can raise the bar for the quality of our online guides across institutions.