Archiving and deleting pages.

[Chris]

Dear Geneva Web Group members,

At the World Health Organization we are looking into formally implementing a retention schedule  for content. As a result we are updating our guidance on the archiving and deletion of pages. We have started to list out more comprehensive criteria (than what we have now) for when a page can be deleted and when it can be archived. Our idea is to include this as policy within our Web Policy.

 

We have spent a fair bit of time looking in Google for what others do in this area but have not found very much. We have also consulted some of our consultants in this areas, but again they didn’t come up with anything more than what we were considering.

So I thought this would be a good question to ask the group; since many of you are in International Organizations or NGOs where it is important to be transparent, have a historical record of documents but where one’s archived website could quickly dwarf the currently maintained pages.

Here are my questions for the group:

1. What criteria do you use in your Organization to determine whether a page/sub-site should be archived or deleted?
2. Which of the criteria (if any) do you find most useful and why?
3. What would you improve upon in your criteria?
4. Where does your criteria reside? For example in a guidance document, policy, in your head, with IT, with the library/archives?

Thanks

Chris