FW: [WEB4LIB] community calendars

[Gimon, Charles A]

I have just recently put up a new Events Calendar for the Minneapolis Public
Library:

http://www.mpls.lib.mn.us/calendar.asp

This initial version is a little "meaty"--in a soon-to-be-released upgrade
to our entire site, events for individual Library locations also show up on
pages for that location, "Kids" events show up on the Kids page, Board
Meetings show up on the Library Board page, as well as this general
calendar.

Calendar is searchable by word, date or location.

This is being served up from a database on our web server. The page itself
is an Active Server Page written in perlscript. When you access the page or
do a search, it sends a query to the database to pull out the events you
will see. 

Default right now is all events for the next 30 days (which may be a little
overwhelming). Next version of our site will show neighborhood library
events on individual pages for each neighborhood library as well as this
full calendar. Since it's all being served up from the same database,
whenever an event is added or edited, that new event show up automatically
wherever it should appear in the site.

Our Public Affairs department is able to add and edit events in the database
from another active server page--so they can update the website instantly as
needed.

Next enhancement that I want to make to this is to let Public Affairs add a
little thumbnail photo to an event if they want. They're good people, and I
think I can trust them to size them properly and not upload anything that's
particularly ugly. :)

Even though the search works well (and was fun to program), I have mixed
feelings about trusting the average user to search for the events that they
want. In the future, I hope to have more topical pages that will query for
just the events that are pertinent to that page, rather than forcing users
to search.

Disclaimer: the rest of our current website is mostly not my work--a
replacement is finished and pending review.

--Charles Gimon
  Web Coordinator
  Minneapolis Public Library


-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Nickel [mailto:larryn at eauclaire.lib.wi.us] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2000 9:56 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] community calendars


Can anyone refer me to library web sites that do a good job of providing
event calendars that cover an entire community?  I am particularly
interested in how libraries are efficiently updating these calendars.

Larry A. Nickel
L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library
Eau Claire, Wisconsin