A content inventory is a structured record of the content on your website. It tells you what you have, where it is, who owns it, and often whether it may need attention.
For a university managing thousands, or tens of thousands, of pages and other assets, that visibility is essential. You can't effectively govern content you don't know exists.
A useful inventory might include information such as:
Page title and URL
Content type
Content owner
Last modified date
Publish status
Review date
Metadata
Whether an asset is being used
Whether content may be stale
The exact information will vary by institution and technology. The important thing is being able to see the website as a collection of manageable content rather than thousands of individual pages scattered across departments and sites.
A content inventory tells you what you have. A content audit helps you decide what to do with it.
An audit adds evaluation. Is this page accurate? Is it useful? Does it meet accessibility and SEO standards? Does it support an institutional goal? Should it be kept, updated, consolidated, or removed?
The inventory provides the foundation for answering those questions.
University websites accumulate content quickly. New programs launch, news stories and events are published, faculty members leave, deadlines change, and departments create new pages without removing old ones.
Without an inventory, web teams can easily lose visibility into what they're managing.
A content inventory can help identify pages with no assigned owner, stale content, unused assets, content overdue for review, unpublished drafts, and other areas that may need attention.
It also makes major projects easier. Before a redesign or CMS migration, for example, an institution can determine what should actually move to the new site instead of automatically carrying years of unnecessary content forward.
A content inventory is most valuable when it isn't just a spreadsheet created once before a redesign.
Connect content to owners. Establish review dates. Regularly identify stale or unused content. Give contributors visibility into what needs their attention.
When possible, take action directly from the inventory: assign an owner, schedule a review, notify a contributor, unpublish outdated information, or remove something that is no longer needed.
That turns the inventory from a list of pages into part of an ongoing content governance process.
A university can't effectively manage thousands of pages by remembering what is out there. A content inventory gives the institution visibility into what it has so it can decide what deserves to stay, what needs attention, and who is responsible for it.