An Information resource is tools that can help people solve a myriad of problems. It organizes information on a particular subject in one location and allows said information to be retrieved and called upon when needed. So we were intrigued in crafting an information resource of sorts to solve the many problems that plague our college of City Tech. Since there really isn’t many students, if any at all, that spend 9 months of their lives living on a City Tech campus the school consequently lacks a ton of student life information, well access to said student life info. For example many colleges, even other CUNYs, offer information on all student’s clubs and host them online. From there our mission became clear; we wish to craft an information resource topic about all the student clubs that can be found at New York City College of Technology. As students at the school, we are all entitled to access to these clubs but even gaining knowledge of what clubs actually exist in the first place, where they meet and what they do is too much for your typical busy college student to go around the campus and investigate. How do they expect students to learn about all the clubs available? Throughout the campus there’s posting of ads clubs put up whenever they have events. Boo! After doing some additional investigation we found out that information on all the active City Tech’s student clubs can only be found in a binder which is held at Student Activities Office (room G515). Which seems counterproductive since the binder cannot leave the room. Apparently this information would also exist on the school’s website if that site was updated and maintained; the information is well out of date there’s no info on modern clubs what so ever and some of the clubs listed are inactive. So a new updated online database is clearly in order.
We wanted our database to not just be a static page where all the clubs are listed but we set it to have it be organic. What we learned from other colleges and how they lists club information is that the page is just static; it doesn’t really interact with you and it doesn’t really change unless the page master goes in and makes edits . We figure that the best information resources are the more organic ones which the user can interact with on some kind of level. What takes for us to make an organic information resource is a really good search feature. The ability to search the database with tags or keywords that make sense and return what you may expect is very empowering for users. Imagine being able to type into the search bar “Wednesday” and your results are clubs that meet on Wednesday. This is empowering for a couple of reasons one is that a user who is interested in finding specific information about a club and searching them based on that can do so. Wanted to find out which clubs meet on a day you’re actually free? No problem! Just search the day you’re free and it should yield some results. This feature implies 2 additional features to make it work. One is that every club basically gets their own page in the database and not just a couple of lines of text explaining that it exists. The second is our database will not only make use of keyword searching but tags as well.
Another way were going to make the site more organic is by something hinted earlier and that’s user editing. It seems that other colleges just have a page master that edits the club page at the end of every semester. If the club has its own website then it just links to it and that’s something we’ve seen in sites for colleges like Harvard. What we want is for the club members to come in and be able to edit their own club page and keep the flow of information on them consistent and organic. Who knows the club better than the club members themselves? The platform we wish host our information resource on is the WIKIA since it naturally allows for these.
