Library Guides Life Cycle: Archiving and Deleting

Any decision to archive or delete a guide is made by the Subject and Support Guide FIT lead (Susan Mansley) in conjunction with Jo Clark as the LSLG Lead for Library Subject and Support Guides.

Network Owners and/or Chief editors should contact Susan in the first instance to discuss archiving or deleting a guide.

Guides may be archived if:

• The subject area has no active courses, but the course area may be reactivated in the future.

eg Environmental Monitoring and Technology. No courses running in 2024.

• The service has been discontinued, but a similar service may be reintroduced and the guide layout etc may provide useful information to inform the next guide. Eg Studiosity may be making a comeback.

Process

1. Consider if any content should be moved to another guide.

2. The guide is set to private mode.

It won't appear in the current list on the website and is invisible to search engines. People with the original url will still be able to locate the guide

2. The term zArchived: is added to the guide name.

3. A suitable banner is included at the top of the Welcome page. Copy the example on the reusable guide. 

4. Using the URL of the guide to be deleted, the assets list is searched for any references to the guide. Any references found are deleted.

5. The editing team is reassigned to other guides.

6. An announcement is made on the library Teams site and any relevant SEN/TEN groups are informed. 

Guides may be deleted if:

• The course has been replaced by a newer qualification and the old qualification will not be taught again.

  Older versions of course guides remain active until teach out is complete.

• The service is no longer available- eg a database that is no longer subscribed to.
• The support area is not required and not actively used. eg  Accessibility for the Web and Digital Citizenship.

Process

1. Consider if any content should be moved to another guide. EG Learner Driver Guide content will be reduced to a topic page that can be added to the  Foundational Studies guide if and when the course is re-run.

2. Any pages or boxes mapped from the guide to be deleted are copied to the guide that has the mapping.

Note the URL of the mapped pages.

3. The mapped pages are then deleted from the guide that is staying and the copied pages are given the old URLs from the deleted mapped page.

4. Using the URL of the guide to be deleted, the assets list is searched for any references to the guide. Any references found are deleted.

5. For Higher Education guides, identify Learning Bank content that is no longer required or used in another course guide. Any such content should be deleted from the Learning Bank to comply with our copyright obligations and processes.

6. The guide is deleted.

7. The editing team is reassigned to other guides.

8. An announcement is made on the library Teams site and any relevant SEN/TEN groups are informed.