Introduction

Your strategic framework and the strategy approach are all about the horizon thinking required to keep your web presence headed in a forward trajectory in the longer term.

On a day-to-day basis, you also need some scaffolding to help support your operational activities. This is what we'll look at in this chapter: the policies, procedures and guidelines which are commonly needed in a cultural heritage environment.

Before we go any further, let's get a definition of these terms.

According to Wikipedia:

In contrast, Wikipedia defines guidelines thus:

These documents are all essentially used in an operational scenario to help you to act in a considered, consistent and measured way.

As with your strategy, your policy documents should be living documents: you should make sure that you revisit them on a regular basis, amending and developing when required. Because these documents change regularly, find a mechanism which allows you to update them easily – also, make sure that you use a visible and effective versioning system: you should know who updated each document, what changes they made, and when they did it.

A highly recommended approach when it comes to these kinds of document is to publish them as web pages – preferably externally on your main website (and password protected if individual documents are sensitive), or internally on an intranet or whatever your equivalent is.

Policies, procedures and guidelines

In this chapter we'll look at some of the common policies, procedures and guidelines that are useful in a cultural heritage online context. Some are meant for internal audiences; others are created for legal compliance or external audiences. The examples here don't represent a complete list – every organization is unique, and you'll need to approach this from your own individual perspective, but it should hopefully give you some sense of the areas you should be considering.