Last weekend I was at the Midwest Archives Conference symposium on digital preservation in Lawrence, KS, which means I once again have two weeks worth of blogging to catch up on. And once again, it was a busy two weeks. Before leaving town on Thursday the 6th, I was scrambling to get ready for our consultant's visit the following week. This involved finding available space on campus to hold two public presentations, one on Tuesday evening and another on Wednesday morning; sending out last minute emails to advertise the events; getting information for a press release; and having a conference call with David (the consultant from CTC).
It was a little crazy, but everything turned out fine. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the Tuesday presentation on building digital communities because I had class, but I heard it was well-attended. On Wednesday morning, we had a two-hour consulting session to talk about the Community Information Portal, which I thought went really well. Then came the second presentation, which was about Drupal modules and drew an even bigger crowd than the previous night's. All in all, I thought the visit was a success.
I couldn't rest on my laurels though, because I still had the Nov. 20 Drupal class to finish coordinating. This took up a good deal of my time last week. Almost 30 people are expected to attend, and I've been fielding emails from them. Cliff and Matt Arant will be leading the class, and we had a meeting on Thursday to plan the course. Since the first class is covering basic Drupal skills, we also decided to follow up with a second, more advanced class on site building in December. This will be taught by Daniel Walls, a student in the Engineering Department. So now I've begun planning that as well, and will simultaneously need to organize the 2-day training workshop we're planning for December or January.
Somewhere in there I also need to work on the Portal Community Interface (not to be confused with the Community Information Portal), but that's a topic for another post. Hopefully I will have some progress to report on that next time.
