Rules And Regulations

Don’t think that just because something is possible it is necessarily permitted.

Talks.cam is hosted on University computers, so when you use your talks.cam account, you are subject to the rules governing users of University computers. Putting information into talks.cam is a lot like publishing web pages on a University machine.

’My journal club / seminar series is not open to the public, but talks.cam is so handy, I would like to use it to organise events – may I?’

Yes, that’s fine – any academic activities that fit, help yourself! It’s helpful if you use either the ‘abstract’ field or the ‘special message’ field on the ‘Add a new Talk’ form to tell people that it’s only open to members of your department/club/whatever. Please be aware that even if you opt out of our own search index, your listing may still be found by Google and similar sites. See our Privacy and Publicity page.

Experimenting with Talks.cam

Please do not add false information into Talks.cam. If you want to experiment with adding talks etc., the place to do this is your personal list. However, anything you do there will still be found by Google! What about humour, or parodies?

The level of service provided by talks.cam

Talks.cam is hosted by Information Services at the University of Cambridge. University Information Services (UIS) is providing limited helpdesk support for Talks.cam via e-mail.

Telephone support

There is no telephone or face to face support provided for talks.cam

E-mail support

Messages to webmaster@talks.cam.ac.uk will usually be answered within a week.

Loss of service

If the talks.cam service becomes unavailable there may be a significant (ie a week or two) delay if the appropriate staff are not available.

The consequence of this for sites that use embedded feeds from talks.cam in their pages is that no data will be shown, some browsers may indicate a javascript error on the page and some browsers may delay rendering the page until their request to talks.cam has timed out (potentially up to a minute).

Loss of data

The talks.cam database is backed up nightly.

Dealing with inappropriate data

Data may be entered into the talks.cam system by anyone who registers using a valid e-mail address. This effectively means anyone.

Inappropriate data should be reported to webmaster@talks.cam.ac.uk who will investigate and remove it as a priority. However, vacation and staff commitments may mean this takes up to a week.