Culture program receives funds

ENVISAGE is studying the technical feasibility of a web portal by collecting data from 19 cultural venues, including the IU Auditorium, the Department of Theatre and Drama, the IU Art Museum, the Bloomington Area Arts Council and the Monroe County Convention and Visitors Bureau.\nEach organization has its own online calendar, ticketing and merchandising systems that can be consolidated into the portal. \n"The goal is to create an infrastructure to aggregate all of this information into, first of all, one Web site," ENVISAGE founder and president Ari Vidali said. \nOnce all the information is in a central database, it will also be available through each organization's Web site. \nFor example, if someone were at the IU Auditorium's Web site, looking at the events on a particular day, he could see all the events in Bloomington on that day without going back to the main site.\nThe exact details have not yet been worked out, but visitors to one Web site could get advertisements or announcements from similar venues.\n"The portal will provide data to help venues create more effective materials," said Guevara. \nIU and the Corporation will each contribute $20,000 to the project's $50,000 price tag, with the remainder coming from ENVISAGE. Vidali said the money will fund interviews and system analysis with each organization.\n"We hope to have (the project) done by January 2004, provided we can get the necessary time out of the participants," Vidali said.\nThe completed project will include a prototype of the portal and a blueprint of how to centralize the services. The Corporation and IU will have to decide how to proceed from there. \nThe web portal will not focus on creating new business, but on promoting Bloomington's cultural resources by raising awareness, Vidali said. A major concern for ENVISAGE and the Corporation is underattended and unattended events. \n"We have events that no one is attending because no one knows about them," he said.\nThe Corporation refers to people who visit Bloomington in order to participate in cultural programming as "cultural tourists." They can come from Bloomington or from around the region. Vidali said he envisions a win-win situation.\n"There will be a positive impact for the cultural tourist, who will be able to find events easily, and for the artists, who will be able to share customer information," he said. "Everyone will benefit."\n"I'm looking forward to the portal," freshman David Ford said. "It will help me find something to do around here. We have something like that in Louisville, and it's a nice service"