What is the Knowledge Bank?
The WWU Knowledge Bank is the result of a collaborative group project done by the WWU Technology User's Group, an affiliation of  WWU staffers from the Office of University Communications, ATUS, Fairhaven College, Admissions, CFPA, Western Libraries, and the Alumni Association.
The genesis of the project began with a simple set of questions: what happens to the articles and links sent out every day to the campus in Western Today? Could they be saved and archived, in a searchable, user-friendly way, so that anyone on campus would have access to them?
The answers to both those questions was yes.
 
How does it work?
Using a social bookmarking system called Delicious, each day the Office of University Communications finds internal and external links on the Internet, bookmarks them in Delicious, and tags them. Tagging is the process of categorizing the web links so that they can be put into searchable bundles; for example, an article in the Bellingham Herald about a speaker coming to a CBE event might be tagged under "CBE" and "events." Each of the Delicous tag bundles is then fed using RSS (Real Simple Syndication) to the Knowledge Bank page, where simply clicking on the feeds brings up a list of all the articles and links that have been tagged and placed in that bundle.
 
Questions?
Have questions about the Knowledge Bank, Delicious, RSS feeds, or anything about the process described above? E-mail Matthew Anderson or John Thompson in the Office of University Communications and we'll do our best to answer them. We hope you find the Knowledge Bank to be a useful tool!