Digital Content
Digital Content Owners
The digital content owner (DCO) is an individual within a department or organization who serves as the point of contact and local subject matter expert regarding a unit's digital/online content (e.g., their website or web content
Do I Need a DCO?
You need a DCO if:
- You have a website specific to your department, organization, lab, or personal website that conducts business on behalf of the university, department, school, or clinical enterprise, whether within the UCR.edu domain or externally (e.g. Google).
- Your organization is responsible for updating content on existing websites that are not specific to your organization.
You do not need a DCO if:
- You do not have a specific website.
- You do not have oversight of any website content.
Who Should Be the DCO?
Who is selected as the DCO is dependent upon the needs of your organization and the skills that your team brings to the table.
The DCO should meet the following standards.
- They need to undertake website and accessibility training to ensure that they have the knowledge necessary to assume the role.
- They need confident writing skills and an understanding of the standards of content creation for websites.
- They will need to have the support of their organizational leadership and the authority to make decisions to ensure updates can be made promptly and efficiently.
Duties of the DCO
Upon being selected, the DCO should contact the associate director of digital communications in Strategic Initiatives to be recorded as the DCA for their site.
- Review content on https://websites.ucr.edu.
- Review content on https://accessibility.ucr.edu.
- On a regular basis - ideally quarterly, the DCO should review all the pages of their website for obvious errors.
- On an annual basis, the DCO should work with their senior leadership to review content and make updates.
- The DCO may request access to SiteImprove if they wish to do advanced reviews of sites. Please contact the associate director of digital communications to arrange access.
Responsibilities of Strategic Initiatives Digital Communications Team
The digital communications team in Strategic Initiatives works with UCR Campus Web Technologies to ensure the quality of all UCR School of Medicine websites. This includes using technologies such as SiteImprove to review sites.
Strategic Initiatives will maintain a list of site owners and DCAs.
As the SOM's designated site manager, the director of digital communications has editorial access and the right to make corrections and edits to sites. In some circumstances, these changes may be made without notification to DCA or page owner.
In cases where edits are complicated or require insights beyond what our knowledge, we will contact the DCA to discuss the required changes.
DCAs may also contact the director of digital communications if changes need to made that they are not capable of doing. In some cases we will make the changes and, in others, may teach the DCA how to make the change.