Shane Nackerud
Web Services Coordinator
University of Minnesota
Eric F. Celeste
Associate University Librarian
University of Minnesota
The UThink project at the University of Minnesota Libraries provides personal, class related, and departmental blogs to the students, staff, and faculty of the University of Minnesota. Anyone with a U of M Internet ID and password can create a library hosted blog. So far, over 1,000 blogs have been created, with over 14,500 individual entries, and over 1,900 individual users making UThink the largest academic blogging site in North America. This presentation will focus on how we got to this point and where we’d like to take the project next. We will discuss why we created UThink, and the goals we have for the project. We will also discuss the backend architecture of the system, policy decisions necessary to host blogs, integration with other library and campus systems, and we will give a demonstration of the system itself.
Handout (PDF)
