Project Process

The project team will be reviewing Sites and pages for the following, and we recommend anyone remediating their Site on their own or ahead of our process review for these as well:

• Facts or factual references to UMBC policies, processes, or guidelines
• Content referencing 2023 or older that is not clearly meant to be historical
  • Example to keep: A page clearly labeled “history of [site name]” with a timeline going back further than 2023
  • Example to flag for archive: A page for a one-time event that happened in 2019
  • Example to flag for delete: A list of “upcoming trainings” that are all from 2019
• Pages not edited or updated since 2023 or earlier
  • Is this content truly evergreen content that doesn’t need to be updated frequently, if at all?
  • Is this essential content to the function of this unit (meaning it should be kept very accurate), or just “nice to have” content?
• Staff listings, phone numbers, email addresses, and any other form of contact listed
• Media (images, videos, audio files) and external files (PDFs, google files, etc)
  • Anything kept during this phase will need to be remediated (where necessary) in the next phase
• Links all work and direct to the correct place (Silktide’s content review section checks for this!)

The following is some additional recommendations based on common findings across a variety of UMBC Sites:

Are there references to departments, offices, etc that either no longer exist, or have been re-named?

In particular, watch out for:

• i3b (Initiatives for Identity, Inclusion and Belonging) is now Student Engagement and Belonging, or you can refer to the individual centers:
  • Commuter Connections
  • Graduate Student Life
  • The Gathering Space for Spiritual Well-Being
  • The Mosaic: The Center for Cultural Diversity
  • The Pride Center for LGBTQIA2+ Diversity
• Campus Life is now Student Engagement and Belonging
• BRACT is now Retriever CARE
• OCSS is no longer an office, the individual pieces of OCSS have been moved:
  • Commuter Connections is now under Student Belonging
  • Retriever Support Services is now its own office and includes Retriever CARE, Retriever Essentials, Essential Needs and Connections, Veteran and Military Affiliated Affiliated Services
  • Transfer Student Support is now Student Affairs Success Initiatives
• University Health Services (UHS) and the Counseling Center are now, together, Retriever Integrated Health
• The Women’s Center is now the Women’s, Gender and Equity Center
• International Education Services (IES) is now the Office of International Students and Scholars
• The Office of Equity and Inclusion (OEI) is now the Office of Equity and Civil Rights (ECR)

Evaluate content not owned by your department:

• Does your site currently contain PDFs, files, or website content owned by another department or website?
• Instead of maintaining another department’s content, reduce to the essential information that can be kept “evergreen” and include a link to the full content or files
• “Frequently found” types of this content, and where we suggest to link to instead:
  • UMBC Travel Process: travel.umbc.edu
  • About UMBC: umbc.edu/about
  • Visiting UMBC: umbc.edu/about/visit/directions
  • Parking at UMBC: parking.umbc.edu
  • UMBC Campus Maps: umbc.edu/about/visit/directions
  • Change of Major / Declare Major: registrar.umbc.edu/forms/records-updaterequest-forms
  • Classes Offered This Semester: my.umbc.edu/go/schedule
  • Courses Offered (general): catalog.umbc.edu
  • Careers / What To Do With This Major: careers.umbc.edu

Ask what content should be posted directly to the website

• What could instead be re-developed into a tagged myUMBC feed that will auto-import to the website?
• Pro-tip: Did you know you can have as many myUMBC feeds on your Site as you’d like?
• You can set up myUMBC feeds to only import in posts or events that are tagged in specific ways, meaning you can curate a wide variety of feeds that will live “evergreen” on your website. Learn more about how to set up a myUMBC feed here!
• myUMBC feeds will also auto-import the accessibility features given to the myUMBC post or event, meaning you don’t have to worry about ensuring the content is accessible twice

As a part of the Content Review, our recommendations will likely include pages that we want to consider archiving or deleting.

What’s archiving?

General Guidance

• Review your pages through the Sites back-end list of pages, not your navigation on the live website.  Most Sites have pages that were removed from the navigation but never deleted or marked private.  These pages are still live, and still feed to Google and AI.
• Generally, the more pages your Site has, the more should be marked for archival and deletion.  We recommend that Sites strive to remove 25% of pages (the primary target should be pages no longer available through the Sites’ navigation), but this is a very loose guideline.  Use your best judgment!  If your Site only has 6 pages, this may not apply at all.

What kinds of content should be kept for archival, ideally?

Reference the current physical archival guidance

• “Records of enduring value made or received officially by UMBC and for other materials of historical value related to the function and history of UMBC”
• Questions to ask as guideposts:
  • Does it have historical content about UMBC?
  • Is it content about the function of UMBC?
  • Is this content about cultural events, or the development/growth of UMBC?
  • Does this content offer representation of student life, community engagement, or faculty research?
  • Could this content be relevant to compliance, legal claims, or institutional accountability?
• Some content might be of archival value but may be better off in the actual Library physical archive (or their curated digital archive) than being stored on Sites.  Contact speccoll@umbc.edu about any of the below:
  • • Advisory board, committee, student org, etc related content (minutes, agendas, correspondence, constitutions, by-laws, etc)
    • Any reports, data, or records
    • Content about or from individual faculty, staff, or students

“What do I do if I don’t think something should be archived, but my content owner is adamant it be kept?”

• Lead with curiosity and generosity, our goal is to get this process completed, not have it be perfect!
• Inquire if it can be stored elsewhere: Can they/you/the department download it and keep it on Box instead?
• If it can’t be stored elsewhere, can it be made private or password protected on the website instead?
• Ultimately, it’s okay to archive something that isn’t a perfect candidate for archiving.  Archiving a Sites page isn’t permanent, and you can always revisit this page or conversation later!

Deleting Guidance

What should be deleted instead of archived:

• Stub pages (very low content); in some cases, we’ve seen a bunch of small pages that should be condensed into one larger page and the smaller (stub) pages deleted
• Blank or “coming soon” pages
  • If these have been in “coming soon” for more than six months, we recommend deleting them
  • If these have been created in the past six months, we recommend moving them into draft status
• Any old content pages that are no longer relevant or needed and not of archival value