Best practices for Event Communities (EC)

Best practices for Event Communities (EC)

1.      Before you create the community – ask these questions:

What is the goal for putting the EC in Digital Commons?

                                                            i.      To meet grant requirements (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/rocreformtrail/)

                                                             ii.      Archive a past conference (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/g2/ or http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/lib2lms/)

                                                           iii.      Provide ongoing support (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/divconf/) this conference has been hosted through Digital Commons for 5 years now. DC is so embedded into this conference that I have been made a member of the DivConf committee

                                                           iv.      Manage the conference through DC – including submissions, links to registration, maps, evaluations, proceedings, social media etc.  (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dcglug/)

So, depending on what level of involvement you are looking for, you might just set up a site, publish a schedule – with or without in-depth abstracts, follow-up after the conference to solicit presentations, vet submissions through DC, publish a proceedings booklet, and/or add photos and videos afterwards. We have all of those different types of conferences within Digital Commons at Brockport. But here, specifically are the things I did for DCGLUG.

I knew I wanted the DCGLUG site to be as robust as possible. I collaborated with another librarian to create the banner, which then was used on promotional material as well as at the top of the site. The introductory text changed several times throughout the conference lifespan. It originally contained links for submission of proposals, along with descriptions of what the sessions would look like. It later contained links to registration, pre-conference events, accommodations, directions, etc. For the most part, I commented them out (see attached) when I wanted to eliminate them from view. Post conference it was updated to give a summary of the day, and a link to next year’s conference.

One of the things my CSR (Lauren) will tell you is that I hate to make people drill down to get to content, so it’s important to me to have as much information appear on the landing page as possible. In the beginning, you had to drill down for everything (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/divconf/2012/). But in the DCGLUG, the schedule is available on the landing page, and the pdf icon tells you immediately whether the presentation is there. (The pdf icon is something your CSR will have to add for you).  I also wanted to add a Twitter feed to the sidebar to capture moments of the conference. Once I decided on a #, I let Lauren know and she added it. I believe there are two options for a Twitter feed, your CSR can explain the difference – we always use this one. Since I really wanted to capture and preserve as much of the day as possible, one of my colleagues (Jennifer Kegler) and I took photos throughout the day, and another colleague (Ken Wierzbowski) volunteered to video capture it.  Jennifer uploaded her photos to the library’s Flickr account, and I combined the best of her collection with mine and asked Lauren to create an image gallery (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dcglug_images/), which I then pulled from to make the content carousel (Configuration option on your event community page).

For the videos, Ken and I both have Kaltura Media Space accounts through Brockport’s subscription. He was able to upload the video he took to there, and I was able to go in and create the embeddable link, and add it to the page using Embedly. 

Notes on administering an event community

The SEGue Event Community administration:

Event communities consist of Themes (years), Tracks (schedule), and Events (submissions), as well as Introductory Text and some documents (such as the program).

To create a new Theme:

Go to Configuration, Create new theme, Submit changes. It will bring you to a new page where you will add your theme title (2018), and if you want, a link to the English department and label, in the THEME CONFIGURATION section. Submit changes.

To create a new Track:

Go to the Configuration section of your new theme (2018), select Create New track. Submit changes. It will bring you to a new page where you will add your track title (schedule), and if you want, a link to the English department and label, in the TRACK CONFIGURATION section. Submit changes.

To assign events to a track:

Go to Manage Events. Click on an event title, go to Revise Event in the left sidebar. Check to see if there is a Session Title assigned and other things that need to be removed or added. For example, to place it in a specific order in the schedule, there needs to be a starting time assigned. Use a 24 hours format. An ending time is not required. Once you have looked at all the metadata (page information), then click SUBMIT at the bottom of the page, and choose Post in the left sidebar. Assign it to the correct track, and when you are all done, update the site.

How to revise an event that is already posted:

You can do this two ways. One would be to go to the Manage Events page, and choose the State: All events (the default will be Not Yet Posted). The easier way is to go to the (front end) schedule page (http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/segue/2017/). Right click on the event title you want to revise so it opens in a new tab. Choose Edit Event. It takes you to the metadata page. Choose Revise Event in the left sidebar. Make your changes, click SUBMIT at the bottom of the page. Close the tab. Go back to the schedule page and do the same thing for the remaining events you want to revise. When you have revised everything you need, update all the levels (Update IR Event Community in sidebar). 

Live linking an event for an event community

Problem: When you want to refer to a Related Website in an event community, the link works on the Schedule page. It doesn't work on the related metadata page, however.

Example: http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/dcglug/ 
Ask the Experts event works fine on the schedule - it takes you to: https://padlet.com/kmyers20/pfq43sp4oegj, but on the actual metadata page, it does not. 

Solution: Bepress can add a WYSIWYG field - here are instructions from Lauren:
I’ve made the change for you. Take a look at the submission form:
http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/ir_submit.cgi?context=divconf&edbypass=1
You’ll see there is now two “Event Website” fields. The first one is the one that was already there. I’ve added some instructions- “Enter the URL that should display on the schedule page. Do not use HTML.” This field will pull the URL straight onto the track:
http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/divconf/2016/
The new field also called “Event Website,” is a WYSIWYG field. The instructions read “Enter the URL that should display on the article information page. Use the WYSIWYG field to link the URL.” You should enter the same URL, then use the little chain icon to link it. This field will pull the URL into the article information page, here:
http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/divconf/2016/schedule/21/ Because you’ve used the link feature, the item will be hot linked, as you requested.

Ta-da!

Diversity and other conferences - making the schedule appear main page

For years now I thought that Support had to work the magic that made the schedule appear on the front page of an event community. Nope, it turns out it is as simple as embedding the Introductory Text on the schedule track page (duh). Of course, then you have to run both a tract level (schedule) and a theme level (year) update to get it to show up.

From the correspondence files:
I think what we’ve got here is another case of the introductory text in the theme configurations instead of the track configurations. If you look at the configurations for the track from 2015, you’ll see that it’s <h3>:
http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/user_config.cgi?context=divconf/2015/schedule
The track level for 2016 is still showing the h2:
http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/user_config.cgi?context=divconf/2016/schedule
You’ll want to update the track level configurations to match that <h3>, then run a track level update and a theme level update.

I might also suggest removing the theme level (2016) introductory text from this year (and maybe 2015) so you don’t run into this again next year.

Another new discovery - if you want to keep text in the coding, but hide it from view the way to do that is - <!-- text to be hidden -->.