Durham, NC - Yale University launched a new online events calendar last week that strongly resembles the calendar Duke rolled out last fall -- and for good reason: Duke programmers shared the calendar's code with their counterparts at Yale.

"We really liked the way Duke did it in terms of both the look and the functionality," said Eric Wittmann, the technical leader of Yale's project. "We were under a fairly substantial time and money crunch. It was above and beyond that Duke shared its code with us."

Duke and Yale both built their calendars on the Bedework software platform developed originally at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), which leads a consortium of university users that share programming code and enhancements. Yale used the software to also create calendars for its art gallery and rare book and manuscript library.

"It's inspiring to me that Yale thought so highly of our calendar that they implemented it with few changes," said Jeremy Bandini, senior IT analyst in Duke's Office of Information Technology. RPI's Arlen Johnson said the consortium plans to incorporate several key aspects of Duke's calendar into future versions of its core Bedework software for other universities to use as well.

As Yale launched its calendars, Duke geared up for a new round of sessions to train campus administrators, students and others about Events@Duke, which was viewed about 2,000 times daily at the end of last semester -- far outstripping the traffic for Duke's previous online calendar.

The Duke School of Medicine and several basic science units recently began adding their events to the calendar, which will now include more scientific seminars along with its listings of arts programs, lectures, sports and other events.

A companion calendar for Duke students, buzz, also gained traffic steadily following its rollout in January, a few months after Events@Duke. Its listings have ranged from student meetings and productions to lighter fare such as food tastings and a Lion King singalong. Deb Johnson, the assistant vice provost who oversees Duke's calendar project, expects buzz to include an even wider array of events when students return to campus. Duke's Graduate and Professional Student Council recently started posting its events to buzz as well.

"Both the main events calendar and buzz have a lot of momentum as we enter the new school year," Johnson said. "We'll be working with Student Affairs and others to keep the momentum going by talking about buzz with new students at orientation and promoting it with advertisements on campus buses and elsewhere. We're also working with Human Resources to ensure that new Duke employees know the calendars are available for posting their events and finding interesting things to do with their families and friends."

Bandini and Johnson both called Yale's new calendar "flattering" but emphasized it reflects a collaboration that serves everyone involved, especially during a time of fiscal constraints. "While they were working on it, they found a bug in our code, which helped us make our own calendar better," Bandini said.