For some time, the Dean of Students Office has been sending out a weekly "Briefs" email that outlines upcoming events at the Law School. This email has been largely constructed by hand, based on the Law School's rather archaic custom room scheduling program. Aside from the fact that this process was far more time-consuming for the staff member tasked with carrying it out than was justifiable, the information submitted for room scheduling purposes was often outdated by the time the event actually occurred.
For this reason, the Communications Office has been working with the Dean of Students to streamline and improve the system for producing Briefs. The new system, which will be launched at the beginning of the Winter Quarter, should keep information about events accurate across multiple platforms (the Law School website, digital signage in the library, and Briefs), reduce drain on staff time, and provide students, faculty, and staff with the most-up-to-date information available.
Important changes to note:
Briefs will now be sent daily, rather than weekly.Update: Briefs will continue to be sent weekly, but a daily option is also available (you may subscribe here). We hope that this will ensure that the information reflected in the Briefs will be as current and up-to-date as possible. If there are no events on a given day or week, you will not receive an email. We recognize that some people may wish to avoid inbox clutter, so if you would like to unsubscribe from Briefs, there will be a link to do so at the bottom of each Briefs email.- Anyone with a CNET ID can now easily add an event to the website, digital signs, and the Briefs through a simple process detailed here (for students) and here (for faculty and staff). Please note that following this process is the only way in which your event will be added to any of the platforms mentioned above. If you would like an event featured on the website, digital signs, and/or Briefs email, you must follow these steps.
Please note that it may take several days for
the new Briefs to begin appearing in your inbox; if you have not begun to
receive daily Brief emails by the end of the first week of classes, Please note that you may receive several copies of the first week's Briefs; ironically, this is actually a spam protection measure, as the email service we use attempt to ensure that your email address is legitimate. This should only happen during the first week. If you have questions or concerns, please get
in touch with me at arester@uchicago.edu.
How It Works
If you're interested in the gory details of the system, it's actually pretty simple:
- Each day at 12:01 a.m., our website automatically produces (via Drupal's Views module) an RSS feed of the days events.
- That feed is converted to an email by a free service called FeedMailPro and delivered to our subscribers.