News Service Q&A

The openTA news service aggregates the news of the cooperating member institutions of the NTA as well as of the European Network of Parliamentary TA Institutions (EPTA) and thereby enables a comprehensive news overview of TA activities in the D-A-CH countries and Europe.

In order to achieve a good selectivity for the user, the openTA calendar service distinguishes four calendars according to their relation to the NTA, each of which can be selected separately:

• Calendar of events of the NTA: This contains events that the NTA itself holds.
• Calendar of events of the NTA member institutions: This contains public events of the cooperating member institution, where they are organizer or co-organizer. In the filter menu of the calendars on the left, the calendar of events of the NTA member institutions can be further expanded. One can then see the individual NTA members providing events. Again, these can be filtered individually for research.
• Calendar of events with TA relevance (outside NTA institutions): This contains dates that are not (co-)hosted by one of the member institutions. Suggestions for dates can be sent to info@openta.net.
• A separate calendar is available for "Teaching events with TA relevance" for which suggestions for additions are also welcome (info@openta.net).

There are three filter options:

1.     Full text search through the current calendar,
2.     Selection of a calendar or a source for a calendar or also several calendars or source,n
3.     Selection of an appointment category (call, conference, course, lecture, workshop, other) or several appointment categories.

The search slot at the top left offers the following options, among others:

•     The search for terms is not case sensitive.
•     Only appointments in the future are searched.
•     To find partial words, a truncation must be made. This is possible at the beginning as well as at the end. "energy*" also finds "energy turnaround" or "energy prices". "*energy" also finds "nuclear energy",
•     If two or more search terms are entered, they are linked with "or": "University of Berlin".
•     With a preceding "+" the search term must be present (ampersand): "+University +Berlin"
•     Searching via the search slot does not include information on the event location, unless it is included in the general description section, and URLs.

No, according to the decentralized approach of openTA, the calendar service can also be integrated as a configurable widget into another website and via the iCal format also into the personal calendar (for example Outlook, Thunderbird). If you want to integrate the openTA calendar service completely or filtered into your website, please contact info@openTA.net for further information. Using the iCalendar icon, you can either transfer individual appointments, selections of the openTA calendar or the entire openTA calendar to your personal calendar.

The cooperating NTA- member institutions provide the dates automatically via the iCal format for the partial calendar of the "Events of the NTA member institutions". The other dates are currently recorded by the openTA team. If you are interested in adding your events to the openTA calendar, please contact info@openTA.net.

It is important to us that even more member organizations of the NTA feed their dates into the openTA calendar service. We also plan to make further functional improvements. Please let us know your experiences, problems and wishes (info@openta.net).

The following openTA documents discuss the openTA news service in detail.

•     Riehm, Ulrich (2013): openTA calendar service - key points. Karlsruhe. (openTA document no. 5)
•     Bauer, Bettina (2014): openTA calendar service: report own events, integrate event feed. Karlsruhe. (openTA document no. 9))

You can find the openTA documents at the address /publications-and-openta-documents#openta-documents .

You can also contact us directly at any time ( info@openta.net ).