New Search Features Enhance Duke's Online Calendar

Events@Duke, the university's online calendar, has introduced a new
search feature that enables students, staff and others to quickly find campus events
of special interest to them.

Users can
now customize their searches by category, date range, group or location,
sifting more easily through approximately 10,000 events posted annually on the calendar by more
than 600 groups across the Duke community.

Located in
the calendar's left-hand column, the new feature resembles searches offered on commercial
sites such as Carmax and Zappos. It includes a "ShareThis" widget for users to share
selected events with friends by email and social media sites such as Facebook
and Twitter.

In addition,
new hyperlinks in calendar entries allow users to further narrow their searches.
For example, a search for "art" may deliver an event at the Nasher Museum. The
user can then click on the "Nasher Museum" link to see other events happening
there. A "map" link shows where the museum is located on the Duke campus.

"In the three years since the university launched Events@Duke, the
site has emerged as the central place for people to find out what's happening
at Duke, whether it's lectures, concerts, sports or social events," said Deb Johnson, the assistant vice provost who
oversees the calendar team. "Since technology changes so rapidly, however, we've updated the site
regularly. This latest upgrade responds to user requests for a more powerful
search function."

Johnson said the calendar now also incorporates student events that
were previously featured on a student calendar, buzz, that the university shut
down in July because of low use by students. Her team worked with Duke Web Services and others within the
Office of Information Technology to make the changes in time for the new
academic year.

Johnson said the calendar team welcomes feedback about the "new" calendar and, to make it easy
to send comments, the calendar team has added a Feedback button in the bottom
right corner of the calendar.