Vetting Process for Library Website Pages

At its January 10, 2005 meeting, WAG approved this vetting process to allow multiple people to review and comment on new pages, or changed Library website pages before they become public. When a page gets vetted falls to the owner of the page, but we would recommend that it is done when the page is first created and again when major revisions are made.

Pages to be vetted will be moved into their correct directories. Revised pages will be named with the ending "_vet", e.g., www.lib.berkeley.edu/find/types/directories_vet.html to avoid confusion with the existing version of the page. New pages with new names do not need the "_vet" ending.

The following metadata should be included to prevent search engines, e.g., Google, from indexing these pages:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow">

See the tutorial Metadata tags that keep Google out for additional information.

An email will then be sent to Reference Staff (refstaff), Roundtable (roundtab), The Affiliated Libraries Administrative Group (affil-ad), Selectors (selector) and Instruct (instruct) with a link to the page to be reviewed and who they should contact with comments. This email will also mention that people are welcome to forward it to others they feel should be included in this vetting process. Also page owners should feel free to ask others directly to review the page(s).

Pages will be up for 2 weeks for comments and the deadline will be included in the email. Comments after that are still welcome, but will fall into the queue. After the deadline, the owner of the page reviews the comments and makes any changes they chose to accept.

Metadata tags mentioned above must be removed. Then send a request to webman to move the page into production. If applicable, webman will then rename the page, removing the "_vet".

The vetting email could come from the page owner, webmaster (Lisa Weber), or web manager (Lynne Grigsby-Standfill).