A presentation from Museums and the Web 2010. This mini workshop will focus on the calendar sub-project of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative’s multi-institutional, Drupal Web site deployment. Like most cultural institution Web sites, the sites from BPOC member institutions have a significant emphasis on events – exhibitions, lectures, classes, tours, performances, etc. Commercial calendar products are often not flexible enough to meet the specific needs of the cultural heritage field, forcing many museums to make do with inadequate calendaring systems at great expense. Additionally, the complexities of scheduling events on-line for museums and cultural institutions (e.g. a tour that takes place every other Monday, except for holidays, when it happens on Tuesday) often leads to either inefficient or, on the other end of the spectrum, overly complex calendaring software that non-technical staff are loathe to embrace and technical staff are loathe to support. Finally, in a multi-institutional environment like Balboa Park, there is significant need for a centralized, automated calendar system that will streamline workflows for marketing and publicity staff by simplifying the data entry process and allowing the institutions to both coordinate events with their neighbors and distribute accurate event information to other media outlets and social networks en masse. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/abstracts/prg_335002337.html

1. Building a Cultural Calendar Balboa Park Online Collaborative San Diego, CA

2. Balboa Park Online Collaborative About 20 Member Cultural Institutions Size and Resources vary greatly Many have no dedicated technology staff They all have online calendars Balboapark.org

4. Goals of project Atomic representation of Events Support for complex recurring events Support for instance-specific data Two-way Aggregation of calendar data between sites Eliminate duplication of effort Simple and efficient backend Compatibility with Drupal components

5. Non-Goals of Project Presentation

7. Existing Calendar Solutions Existing Drupal Date Support Alternative CMS Date Support Google Calendar iCal-based solutions (phpCalendar, etc.)

8. What’s So Hard About Recurring Events? No support for multiple RRULEs No support for combining RRULEs and RDATEs Insufficient Granularity No support for Instance-Specific Data Cumbersome and Complex Backend Recurring Event vs. a Series of Events

15. Aggregation Two-way aggregation of events Propagate changes from multiple points Provide Custom Feeds as required

18. Drupal Components Extended Date CCK Field Javascript CCK Date Field Widget Instance Node Type and Reference Atom-based Event Aggregator Aggregation Client

19. Something to Share? bbostick@bpoc.org

20. Questions?