This is a summary of the Lumen/Guide: Policy on Adding and Removing Pages in Guide. Click here to view the official policy in its entirety in the UW-Madison Policy Library.

Guide is the official, Single Source of Truth, catalog of the University’s academic offerings active during the current academic year. It was reviewed and approved by ACPRAC and the Guide Coordinators. 

For the policy on which pages are included in Guide, see the Rules for Including Academic Pages in the Guide. 

Lumen Structures

Structural changes (renaming, creating or discontinuing a department or school/college, changing the ownership of a program etc.) may only be implemented as part of the June 1 publication of Guide. Changes to departments and subjects have a SIS effective date/term of summer.

Lumen Programs

Adding Pages

When a new Lumen program (plan/subplan) is fully approved through all governance bodies (University Academic Planning Council (UAPC), University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents, Higher Learning Commission), the Office of the Registrar will build a new Guide page once the Lumen program proposal reaches their step of workflow. When building the Guide page, there are two variations that determine which content can be published: Full or Promo. Full pages include all non-governed and governed content. Promo pages include non-governed content only on the Overview and People tabs.

Full Guide pages are added for the June 1 publication of Guide for the following academic year (effective fall). Full Guide pages may also be allowed for mid-cycle publications depending on when they were approved and their effective date, determined by Academic Planning and Institutional Research based on publication rules (see below for chart). Promotional (Promo) pages are an optional feature when a new academic program has been approved but the effective date is for an academic year beyond the current Guide publication year. To clarify when a page will publish, additional fields have been added in the administrative section of the Lumen Programs proposal. 

See the Promotional Pages KB for more information.

For cases where a program qualifies for a Full Guide page, the program will be able to provide non-governed content through the appropriate School/College Guide Coordinator submitted to the Office of the Registrar for the mid-cycle update.  The governed content for the Guide page will come from the approved Lumen Programs content and will be published as populated in the integration points in Lumen Programs.

This chart provides an example with dates:

¹ Programs requiring additional governance approval beyond UAPC, such as the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents or the Higher Learning Commission, the guidelines do not apply. All approvals must be confirmed prior to publication in Guide.

² The January publication results in duplicate creation of Guide pages in the live Guide environment and in the editing “next-guide”, thus these are typically only implemented when the program starts or is changed for a summer term, by request only.

Removing Pages

To maintain the integrity of the version of Guide, no pages will be deleted from the Guide in either the October or January mid-cycle updates. If a plan/subplan has been discontinued, standard text to indicate that the program is no longer accepting students will be added to the Overview and How to Get in/Admissions tabs by the Office of the Registrar.  

See the Guide: Approved Language for New or Discontinued Programs.

A program page in the Guide may only be removed when the June 1 Guide edition is published.

ACPRAC approved policy document (original)
Administrative revisions January 11, 2021