New UW–Madison Policy Library now live

If you need to find one of UW–Madison’s nearly 900 university-wide policies, your task just got a lot easier.

After a two-year effort that engaged stakeholders across campus, the new UW–Madison Policy Library is live at policy.wisc.edu. The online, searchable policy library serves as the single, up-to-date resource for all university-wide polices at UW–Madison. The library features extensive search functionality that allows users to search by topic or keywords.

“The policy library is an excellent and convenient new resource for our campus that greatly simplifies the process of finding applicable campus policy,” says Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Raymond Taffora, who co-sponsored the project with Provost Karl Scholz. The Policy Library Project was managed by the Office of Strategic Consulting, which partnered with the UW–Madison Libraries to provide the front-end user interface and search functionality.

Scores of faculty, staff and students contributed to the effort by inventorying and cleaning up existing policies, creating criteria and guidelines for developing new policies, identifying software needs, updating policy content on websites and in knowledgebases (KBs), and developing tools and templates to support the policy library.

“I thank and congratulate the Office of Strategic Consulting and the teams of faculty and staff from across the campus who have dedicated a lot of time and thought to this project,” Scholz says. “The finished policy library is easy to use and will be a huge asset to our campus.”

All faculty and staff can help maintain library integrity

Maintaining the integrity of the policy library will require the cooperation of everyone on campus, especially those involved in policy development, management or publication. Moving forward, any university-wide policy that is not in the library will not be considered official policy.

The policy library website includes resources and tools that should be used for developing new policies or revising existing policies. These tools are all available on the Policy Development page of the website.

Included are:

• Guidelines for Policy Development at UW–Madison. These guidelines were created by a separate working group that included representation from across campus, including governance.
• Policy Drafting Template. All policies in the new policy library follow a standard template, with consistent formatting and fields. The policy drafting template should be used when developing new policy. Draft policies submitted for review that are not in this template will be put in this template before incorporating into the policy library.
• Terms and Definitions. These explain the standard fields that are included in all policies in the library and on the drafting template.
• Policy Life Cycle. This document illustrates the process for proposing new policy and for reviewing and modifying existing policy.
• Best Practices for Publishing Policy. Any policy that is not included in the policy library cannot be considered an official university-wide policy. While links to university-wide policies may be published on unit web pages, in knowledgebases or in other places, these links must go directly to the policies in the UW–Madison Policy Library. The Best Practices for Publishing Policy document provides further guidance on which practices to avoid when publishing policy-related information.

Going forward, new policies and revisions to existing policies should be submitted to policylibrarycoordinator@wisc.edu to be published in the policy library.

Comments or Questions

If you have comments or questions about the policy library, please send them to policylibrarycoordinator@wisc.edu.