Archive, Don’t Delete: Managing Aging Content and Accessibility Debt in Drupal

Large Drupal sites accumulate years of content that may still have historical value but can be outdated, difficult to maintain, and full of accessibility and technical debt. This is especially the case for academic websites that also publish multiple news stories each week. Deleting content isn’t always appropriate, but maintaining old pages manually also isn’t realistic. 

UCSF’s news content provides audiences with information about scientific breakthroughs, campus happenings, and medical care. However, older content could contain outdated information as well as accessibility issues such as broken links, large media files, and images without alt text. This project gave us an opportunity to address both concerns by identifying outdated content and automatically removing problematic elements, while helping prepare our site for federal Title II accessibility requirements. 

In this session, we’ll share how, in partnership with our IT team, we developed an automated archive presentation within our Drupal site for aging content, in particular, news stories. We’ll discuss the decisions behind this archival approach, how automation and editorial control work together to form governance around decisions, and the accessibility and technical-debt problems we hoped to address. We’ll also share what didn’t work perfectly and the follow-up improvements we identified. 

Attendees will learn how to:
- Approach aging content as a content-governance, accessibility, and technical-debt problem. 
- Combine automated archiving rules with editorial overrides in Drupal. 
- Use lessons from legacy content to inform content modeling and decisions during future web implementations.