Website records

Is website content a University record?

Website content, including the Staff Hub intranet are considered University records. Website content is created and published using a Content Management System (CMS).

How long to retain website records?

Website content should be retained and managed in accordance to the relevant class in the University Records Retention and Disposal Authority (RDA).

Note: It is best practice for Faculty or Chancellery work units to determine the value of their website content upon creation. Instead of at the end, when a website is being decommissioned.

Temporary value content

Most University website content is of 'Temporary' value. See some common examples below.

Note: If multiple RDA classes apply to a single site, then it is typically best practice to round up to the longest period. Faculty and Chancellery work units can seek guidance from Records & Information, as needed by submitting a ServiceNow request.

Permanent value content

A very small number of sites will align to 'Permanent' classes in the RDA, and/or the University of Melbourne Archives' collection policy. These sites should be captured by the University's Web Archiving Program. This program is administered by the University of Melbourne Archives, using a web crawling service called Archive-It.

The web crawling can be set up to occur on a:

• regular basis, such as quarterly
• one-off basis, such as before a site is decommissioned and deleted.

Retaining and deleting content

Temporary web content

Once a temporary value website becomes out of date and requires decomissioning, the site and its content can be unpublished or deleted from the CMS. Follow the steps below.

Important: Before you can lawfully destroy University records, you must first obtain approval via Proof of Destruction. See Destruction of temporary records for guidance.

Note: If the website content has been identified for decommissioning and it is covered by NAP, it can be deleted anytime from the CMS without a Proof of Destruction.

1. Check if the site has already been captured by the Web Archiving Program, by looking up the URL in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
2. If the site has not been captured, then you can locally archive the site in the CMS by first determining the year when the website content was last updated.
3. Look up the minimum required retention period using the University Records RDA. Seek guidance from Records & Information, as needed by submitting a ServiceNow request.
4. Using the year of the last update, add it to the required retention period - now you have the year of when the website content can be destroyed, ie 'destruction year'.
5. If the destruction year has already passed, seek destruction approval from an appropriate delegate from the Chancellery or Faculty work unit responsible for the website content. See Destruction of temporary records for guidance.
   If the destruction year has not yet been reached, unpublish the content and retain it in the CMS until the destruction year is reached.
6. After the destruction year is reached and approval is sought and documented, then delete the website content from the CMS.

If you do not have access to the content via the CMS then submit a web support request.

Permanent web content

Ideally permanent value web content will be captured by the Web Archiving Program on a quarterly basis from its creation until its decommissioning.

If a permanent value website has not been archived and it has been identified for decommissioning as it is no longer needed to support University business, it should be captured by the Web Archiving Program, as a once-off capture. Refer to Web Archiving Program for guidance on submitting archiving requests.

Once the web content has been captured, the Faculty or Chancellery work unit responsible for the website can then proceed with decommissioning the site and deleting its contents from the CMS.

Capturing versions of website content over time

Ideally versions of published website content will be captured over time within the CMS. However, versioning is not always available within a website CMS.

If a Faculty or Chancellery work unit needs to have evidence of their website content over time, they should first investigate if the CMS they are using has versioning. If not, they can then check if the site is being regularly captured by the University's Web Archiving Program.

If it is not being captured, then the work area will need to manually capture the content when amendments are made (eg via printed PDF, screen grab images, or in Word Document of content copy) and retain it locally within an information system, such as SharePoint for the retention period specified in the RDA.