This resource is a little bit unorthodox in that it was not originally intended to be used as a tool for historical research. The LibGuides Community was created as a way for librarians at different institutions to share their LibGuides with each other to promote innovation and cross-fertilization of ideas. However, the LibGuides Community is publicly accessible and can be used very effectively as a research tool if you understand a few key points.
Point #1: There are librarians across the country and around the world using the LibGuides platform at a variety of institutions. Some of these are small, liberal arts college libraries like Augustana's, some are public libraries, some are community college libraries, and some are huge research libraries at public and private universities.
Point #2: When librarians create LibGuides, they are usually creating them for a specific target population at their own institutions, which means they may include references to specific courses or assignments, and they may include links to resources that are only available to members of that institution. In other words, you may come across content that confuses you, or you may see a reference to a resource that sounds amazing, but when you click on it you may encounter a login page that prevents you from accessing it.
Point #3: Most LibGuides are comprised of multiple "pages", and when you search in the LibGuides Community, you will see a separate result listed for every page that contains your search terms. This means you may see several results in a row that are just different pages within the same LibGuide.
With these points in mind, you should be able to make some sense of what you see when you search in the LibGuides Community. The great advantage to this platform is that you can benefit from the deep subject knowledge of librarians scattered around the globe. Larger libraries at larger institutions tend to have librarians who specialize in particular subject areas more than we do here at Augustana. The research guides those librarians create can often save you time and effort by pointing you straight to some of the best resources available. It's like having an army of specialist librarians in your back pocket.
That being said, the interface for searching across the LibGuides Community wasn't really designed for this purpose, so you may find it lacks some of the sorting and filtering capabilities that you are accustomed to in most research databases. For best results, search multiple times with a variety of different search terms, and when you are looking through your results, pay careful attention to the page title, the LibGuide title, and the institution name of the librarian who created the guide. This information will be displayed as follows:
[Page title] on [LibGuide title]
by [librarian's name] at [institution name]