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Support: Editing Borrowed & Shared Content in the Catalog

As a part of ongoing structural improvements to the catalog, the 2019–20 catalog will utilize the catalog system's borrowed and shared content tools. These tools allow you to edit certain content in one place, and to have that same content displayed on other related page(s) where applied. Among other things, this helps us streamline future catalog updates, and you'll only need to edit similar content in one place (rather than on every page it appears).

If you are reviewing a page and notice that any text has a gray box around it and notes "borrowed content" or "shared content," this tells you that the page is referencing content that is set up elsewhere and cannot be edited while you're on this page. 

In some cases, you may be set up to review several related pages: the source or shared page (where you will be able to edit the content directly) and any pages that also display that content (view only) to ensure you're aware of other places where it will appear.

Learn more about the differences between borrowed and shared content below.

  • Borrowed content: Allows a catalog page to borrow content from another page in its entirety. The content can only be edited where it exists as the "source" content; pages where it is copied will flag this content as borrowed content (read only). For example, the University Policies page in the Undergraduate Catalog is the source content for the respective University Policies sections in the Graduate, Law and Continuing Educaiton catalogs as well. Edits made on the undegraduate version of this page will also be reflected on the other career-level catalogs' corresponding pages.
  • Shared content: Blocks of content (paragraphs; generally not a full page) that can be shared on several pages. If you're reviewing shared content, it will show up in your review list as if it were a catalog page. A shared page will not be published as its own page in the catalog; rather, it will only display on other pages where it's been shared. For example, an introductory paragraph about Bachelor's–Accelerated Master's Degree Programs has been set up as shared content. It's set up to be shared on every page with BAM program information, along with additional program-specific information. This BAM introduction paragraph can be edited from its shared page only, not from the individual BAM pages where it appears.

Questions? Contact us; we're here to help.