Building a cultural calendar 
Bill Bostick, Balboa Park Online Collaborative, USA
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.
Mini-Workshop: Calendar [technology]
Keywords: Cultural calendar, Calendar API, Drupal calendar
