CUNY Academic Commons

Oy. Nice catch, and thank you!!! We should review all of the institutions names to see whether there are other updates. we now have the med school, too, and the Murphy Institute name has changed

Hi All,

I cross checked these with the listing on CUNY's website (http://www2.cuny.edu/about/colleges-schools/).

Some updates:

- The Murphy Institute is now the "CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies"
- The "CUNY School of Medicine" looks like its still technically part of City College (?)
- The journalism school is now listed as the "Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism"
- And, not sure how specific we want to be but the CUNY School of Public Health is listed as "CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy"

Thank you, Laurie!

Let's leave the med school off for now and change the others.

Taking a step back before we make more changes, a brief review of where college names are defined in the system, and the roles they play:

1. There's a BP profile field "College" that populates the filters on the left-hand side of https://commons.gc.cuny.edu, as well as the legacy College widget on user profiles (not visible for the majority of users, as it was phased out in favor of Positions). These college names are stored in the database. This was the source of the problem reported in this ticket.

2. The Positions widget on user profiles has a hardcoded list of college names.

3. A handful of newer features - Courses, the Campus Widget, the Library Search Widget, and the upcoming site/group metadata tools - pull the college list from a central store (cac_get_cuny_campuses()) of info about each campus.

Item 1 is mostly for legacy reasons, though it's still responsible for populating the left-hand filter on Members. It should likely be swapped out so that this filter is built using 3. Likewise, the Positions widget should pull its campuses from 3 instead of a separate hardcoded list. That way, at least, we'll maintain them in a single place.

The list above demonstrates that the campus names are used for fairly different things throughout the site. In many places, campuses are presented in a dropdown menu so that the user can select them; in some of these cases, I provide a "short name" (such as BMCC for Borough of Manhattan Community College) just to save space. It could be that we want to have finer-grained control over the way that campus names appear in different contexts. For instance, in the Campus Widget dropdown - visible only to admins - it may make sense that the j-school is listed as "Journalism"; when displaying on user profiles, it might make sense to use the full name; on sidebar filters, we might want to take an in-between course, since the space there is limited.

There's a further question of what to do about campuses that aren't quite campuses, like CUNY School of Medicine. For the purposes of campus affiliation on the Positions widget, for instance, I think it makes sense to be as inclusive as reasonably possible - the med school should be broken out from CCNY. But for the purposes of the Library Search widget, where (for instance) CUNY central libraries don't have a separate gateway for CUNY SPH, we may want to be more select about what's shown in the dropdown. As such, there may be something like a "context" parameter for each school.

Anyway, this gets complicated fast, so I want to be sure we have a clear idea of what we're trying to accomplish before we start adding and subtracting campus names from various lists.

Boone Gorges wrote:

There's a further question of what to do about campuses that aren't quite campuses, like CUNY School of Medicine. For the purposes of campus affiliation on the Positions widget, for instance, I think it makes sense to be as inclusive as reasonably possible - the med school should be broken out from CCNY. But for the purposes of the Library Search widget, where (for instance) CUNY central libraries don't have a separate gateway for CUNY SPH, we may want to be more select about what's shown in the dropdown. As such, there may be something like a "context" parameter for each school.

I was going to argue against this and say we should just list schools that appear on the cuny.edu > About > Colleges and Schools listing, but I see that on the CAC > People page we offer filters for Teacher Academy and Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education, so we are already listing entities that don't appear on that cuny.edu page. So, I'm okay with the inclusive approach

At any rate, the rest of what you say here makes sense to me. do you feel comfortable moving forward or do you want us to hash out the particulars of the decisions that need to be made in the "in-between" use cases?

Okay -- thanks, Boone