With 200+ content creators, the UNC Chapel Hill Libraries website continues to grow each year. Our contributors have busy academic schedules with many user-driven responsibilities, and not everyone is an expert in producing well-organized and effectual content that appeals to a variety of users. To curb the content bloat, our two-person content management team organizes an annual audit of our 475+ page WordPress site and 500+ LibGuides. We refined our content audit approach through 2016, 2017, and 2018, over which time we also began programmatic monthly and weekly upkeep to continually improve the experience we provide to our users. This session will provide a case study of how a small team can effectively maintain a large amount of content in a busy academic library environment. We will share our strategies for encouraging page and guide owners to think more deeply about their content and offer tips on how we’ve effectively scaled our management practices to the size of our site. Though this session focuses on WordPress and LibGuides, the techniques suggested are applicable to any CMS.

1. How to Handle a Whole Lot of Content
A Case Study of What We’ve Learned
Sarah Arnold
Content Strategy Librarian
sjarnold@email.unc.edu
Claire Payne
Content Management RA
cpayne05@live.unc.edu

2. What We’ll Cover
• Who We Are
• The Libraries In-Person and Online
• History of Annual Content Audits
• Current Practices
• Next Steps

3. Who We Are
• User Experience & Assessment
• Department formed in 2012
• Assessment added in 2017
• Oversee web content for University Libraries at UNC
• Create a seamless connection between the library’s
services, collections, physical spaces and virtual presence
• One Library initiative from University Librarian

4. The Libraries In-Person and Online

5. University Libraries In-Person
9 libraries spread across
campus
Excludes
• Law
• Media & Journalism
• School of Government
Photo by Mark B. Perry, Jr

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Davis
Library
Undergraduate
Library
Wilson Special
Collections
Library

7. University Libraries Online: WordPress
library.unc.edu
Separate websites for:
• Health Sciences
• Law
• Media & Journalism
• School of Government
Stats
• Published: 464
• Private: 52
• Draft: 45
• Content Creators: 140

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10. University Libraries Online: LibGuides
guides.lib.unc.edu/sb.php
Includes:
• University Libraries
• Media & Journalism
Separated within system:
• Health Sciences
• Law
Stats
• Published: 749
• Private: 152
• Unpublished: 626
• Content Creators: 161

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13. University Libraries Online: Other Platforms
• Blogs.lib.unc.edu
• 12 individual WordPress sites/blogs
• finding-aids.lib.unc.edu
• ContentDM and Omeka sites
• Digital exhibits and collections
• Documenting the American South (DocSouth)
• Carolina Digital Repository (CDR)
• ...and more

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17. History of Annual Content Audits

18. History of Annual Content Audits: The Beginning
First content audit was in December 2014
• Post-migration to WordPress (August 2013) and LibGuides 2.0
(August 2014)
• Evaluated pages based on:
• purpose
• accuracy of information
• language
• navigation/location within the site
• Followed by user audit

19. History of Annual Content Audits: 2016
Continued process from December 2014
• Individual reports for each content owner
• Focused on central campus LibGuides and library.unc.edu only
• Shared reports separately for each platform
Overhauled Google Analytics with a consultant
• Began using Google Tag Manager to track specific events like
universal link clicks and percent of the page scrolled

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21. Questions to Content Owners
1. Is the content of this page accurate and up to date?
2. Do all links, images, and embeds on this page work?
3. Is the page written in plain language, avoiding library jargon?
4. Does this page duplicate information found elsewhere on the
site?
5. Is the page located in a logical place within the site navigation?
6. Is this page being used? If not, is it because of the content or
because of its location on the site?

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23. History of Annual Content Audits: 2017
Attempted to streamline reporting process
• Combined report for all content owners in WordPress and LibGuides
• Added optional training series focused on 3 topics:
• What is content?
• Accessibility
• Maintaining Content
Created site map of library.unc.edu
• Discovered orphaned and problem web pages

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28. Current Content Management Practices

29. Current Practices
• The annual content audit
• LibGuides cleanup
• User audits
• Analytics, reports, and more!
• Training
• Other training
• Year-round maintenance
• Documentation

30. The Annual Audit: LibGuides Cleanup
• LibGuides environment:
extremely cluttered
• Concerns about patrons
locating inaccurate and/or
inaccessible information
• May 2018: 200+ LibGuides
pages that were easy deletion
targets

31. The Annual Audit: LibGuides Cleanup
The good news:

32. The Annual Audit: User Audits
At any time:
• 120+ WordPress content creators
• 150+ LibGuides content creators
➔ Annual turnover of graduate student staff
➔ Less systematic turnover in permanent staff

33. The Annual Audit: User Audits

34. The Annual Audit: Analytics and Reports
• We use Google Analytics.
• Open source alternatives include Matomo and Open Web Analytics
• Each WordPress and/or LibGuides user receives an
individual spreadsheet with information about all their
pages/guides.
• We pull the data, but we ask content creators to
thoughtfully engage with the reports we package for
them.

35. The Annual Audit: Analytics

36. The Annual Audit: Reports

37. The Annual Audit: Analytics, Reports, and More!
Emails to content creators include:
• What’s required of them
• This year: alt text, nested headings, attending training
• Suggested usability improvements
• This year: human-readable friendly URLs
• Information about understanding their usage reports
Full text of our 2018 emails

38. The Annual Audit: Training
• Two one hour
training sessions
• WordPress
• LibGuides
• Included participants
we don’t oversee
• Law

40. What people are saying…
“Information presented was clear,
directly relates to my work and provides
practical information about making
changes to LibGuides to improve
accessibility.”

41. What people are saying…
“The demonstration of screen reading software
really helped me begin to understand the
challenges visually impaired people face when
"reading" and navigating websites. I also
appreciated the uncomplicated way the
guidelines for best practices were outlined.”

42. Other Training
• “Onboarding”
• Product
redesigns
• Media
accessibility

43. What people are saying…
“Thanks for going over the accessibility
for web content information! I was
vaguely aware that it was an issue, but
never had specific instructions and
explanations on how to help make
pages easier to use.”

44. Year-Round Maintenance
• Accessibility
updates
• Content
deletions
• Monthly backups
• Quarterly
reviews of
documentation

45. Documentation: Calendars

46. Documentation: Records

47. Next Steps

48. Future Plans: 2019 and Beyond
• Creating a Web Content Committee to oversee new projects for
library website and guides
• Ongoing content clean up
WordPress
• Investigating Gutenberg and WordPress Multisite
• Including blogs.lib.unc.edu in annual content audit
LibGuides
• Forming a coordinating/working group in spring 2019
• Including Law Library in annual content audit

49. What We’ve Learned
• You need to know what you have before you can start to
fix it.
• Being realistic is important: you can’t do it all at once.
Doing something is always better than doing nothing.
• Document your processes!

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