More How To Guides

When I was doing a literature review on subject guides, I learned that most users would prefer more of what's known as the 'how to guides' (e.g. how to find a book, how to find an article)

Faculty Interest in Other Library Instruction Options
Percentage of Faculty “Interested” or “Strongly Interested”

	Overall	Science	English	Health
More subject guides, bibliographies	35%	27%	36%	46%
More how-to-guides	48%	42%	48%	58%

(Leckie GJ. Information literacy in science and engineering undergraduate education: Faculty attitudes and pedagogical practices. College and Research Libraries 1999;60(1):9)

Recently Memorial University reviewed their web server logs and found that their most popular guides are the ‘how to’ guides:

Goddard L. Getting to the source: A survey of quantitative data sources available to the everyday librarian: Part I: Web server log analysis. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 2007;2(1)

Notice that the most popular 'how to guides' pertain to the mechanics of formating a paper.