Bates College recognizes the value of weblogs (blogs) as a medium for the expression of ideas and dissemination of information. This policy is subject to the terms of the Bates College Web Policy.
The College provides services for facilitating the collaboration efforts of project teams, working groups, curricular groups and academic committees. In some cases a blog, or group of blogs, will benefit the collaboration efforts of such groups. In other cases further functionality is required. Courses and academic groups that require this functionality should contact Academic Technology Services, while administrative groups should contact Internet Software Services.
Departments, offices or programs of the College may, from time to time, sponsor and maintain noncurricular blogs for the College community. These official blogs will be governed by the Bates College Web Policy, and are subject to review and approval by the Office of Communications and Media Relations.
The College does not provide a blog service or blog software to members of the community for personal blogs or for student clubs and organizations. It is recommended that members of the community who desire such blogs use one of the many blogging services available on the Internet (e.g., blogger.com, livejournal.com, etc.), or establish their own Web site and use one of the many free blogging tools/software applications (e.g., WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Greymatter). In this way, the blogs may remain available after members have left the community.
The lack of content portability between blogging tools and systems poses a real problem to bloggers in an academic setting. Imagine creating a blog over a period of years only to get to the end of your time with the institution and discover there is no good way to take it with you. There is no standard or recommendation from the Internet community for addressing the issues related to the portability of blogs.