Research Guides act as "containers" for content you create separately. There are three ways you can create the content for a Research Guide:

Auto-generated
You create the Guide framework and use "views" and taxonomy terms to generate lists of resources. New resources can be added simply by tagging them with the Guide's topic. Updates to resources are reflected automatically in all Guides that refer to them.

Selective
You selectively insert shared weblinks into a page. This method allows for custom descriptions and custom ordering. New resources must be manually inserted into the page, but updates to resources (such as a URL change) are reflected automatically.

Manual
You enter text and links as static HTML into a page. This provides the most complete control over the content of the guide, but does not make use of any of Drupal's shared-content features.

The provided Research Guide layouts have three basic sections:

1. Introduction (optional) - top left
2. Floating box (optional) - top right - can be used for author profile; a photo related to the guide content; etc.
3. Content - main body of the guide.

If the introduction and/or floating box is not present, the other section(s) will self-adjust to fill the space.

The content of the Guide can be optionally divided into sections by format or by sub-topic. There are two options for presenting these sections - in both options, the user clicks on a tab or topic to see that section of the Guide:

• Horizontal Tabs - best for brief section titles
  Databases | Articles | Websites
• Table of Contents - best for topic titles that should appear in sequence
  Sound recording collections at Stanford
  Searching Socrates
  Using discographies
  Streaming audio
  Links of interest

Here's an example of a Research Guide Layout showing all sections:

An example of a Research Guide Layout - TOC with no introduction section - note that the TOC section moves up into that area.