UBevents calendar makes it easy to publicize university happenings
Put all your campus events online!

Looking for the best way to disseminate information about your campus event? Look no further than the online UBevents calendar.

Launched in July, the interactive and searchable calendar takes advantage of the latest technology to make it easily accessible to members of the university community and allow them to publicize their events more widely. The database also is the foundation from which the Reporter calendar is compiled.

A unique feature of the calendar is that information from its database can be sorted based on topic, keyword or email account of the individual submitting the information and displayed as a customized calendar on another Web site. The School of Nursing has created such a calendar by pulling the entries submitted by registered users who are faculty, staff and students in the school. This capability allows submitters to manage digital assets by avoiding redundancy in calendar creation and allows events to be publicized beyond the scope of a departmental or school Web page.

Creation of the interactive and searchable online events calendar was an initiative of the university's Web Team that involved work by professional staff and student assistants in the university's Office of News Services, Electronic Media Unit in the Office of Publications and the Office of Computing and Information Technology.

The calendar's implementation has involved an even larger collaboration, since its success and effectiveness involves input of information from representatives of schools, departments, centers, programs, offices and student organizations located on both campuses and at affiliated teaching hospitals. More than 170 individuals on campus already are contributing items about events held on campus or under UB sponsorship.

UBevents can be viewed anytime, anywhere by anyone who can access UB Web sites via the Internet. It provides instant information that can be identified by day, week and month.

The online calendar also is instantly searchable. Information can be searched based on factors that include keyword, date, range of dates and location. It also is searchable by the type of event: academic, alumni, athletics, conferences, exhibits, films, lectures, intramurals, meetings, performances, readings, seminars, student events and workshops.

The online calendar is available through a number of Web sites, including a link on each secondary page of the UB homepage, http://www.buffalo.edu, the homepage for UB Wings http://wings.buffalo.edu and the Office of News Services Web site http://www.buffalo.edu/news.

Users enter information for the calendar on a Web-based submission form, which is available at http://wings.buffalo.edu/calendar/login.html and may be used by anyone with a UB UNIX email account. Instructions on how to submit information to the calendar are available at http://wings.buffalo.edu/calendar/instruct.html.

Those wishing to submit information to the calendar first must fill out a registration form that includes a protected user name and password for their university email account, and indicate the categories of events for which they are requesting submission clearance. Registration is instant.

To use the form, submitters each time must enter their user name and the associated password, which prevents anyone outside UB from submitting information and anyone from submitting information under the guise of someone else. It also holds the submitter accountable for the information he or she inputs, since it can be traced back to the submitter.

Once information is submitted, it will be reviewed for style, as well as appropriateness and content, by one of several "calendar administrators." Only after it has been reviewed does the information go "live." Entries are reviewed twice a day, five days a week.

Certain information, such as type of event, the title of the lecture or event, date, time and location, is mandatory, and events will not be entered into the database if those details are missing.

A number of features are designed make the calendar easy to use.

Submitters who fail to input all the information needed for their event to be posted will receive an error message prompting them that some of the necessary information has been excluded.

Further information input in the site's "optional information" category allows submitters to link to their Web sites and provide more detailed information and graphics about the event. This allows users to market events more fully by providing additional information that's not included in the Reporter calendar.

For example, more detailed information about "Out, Loud and Proud," the upcoming March conference of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Alliance (LGBA), including a photo of the conference's keynote speaker, Dan Renzi of MTV's "The Real World Miami," can be accessed at http://wings.buffalo.edu/sa/lgba/conference.html.

The submission form contains a basic spell-check function, as well as options that allow users to edit, copy, preview and remove information they have submitted. The site also allows users to create a template for frequently occurring events.

Once an event has been approved by the calendar administrators and moved to the live calendar, users still can make changes to the entry, although only the person who submitted the information and the calendar editor have that capability. Information about making those changes is available on the online calendar Web site.