Harvard vs MIT

As I build out calendar hubs in various cities I’ve been keeping track of major institutions that do, or don’t, provide iCalendar feeds along with their web calendars. At one point I made a scorecard which shows that iCalendar support is unpredictably spotty across a range of cities and institutions. One of the surprises was Boston, where I found iCalendar feeds for neither Harvard nor MIT.

I’ve recently improved the Boston calendar hub and, as part of that exercise, I took another look at the public calendars for both universities. It turns out that Harvard does offer a variety of calendar feeds. I just hadn’t looked hard enough. There’s even an API:

The HarvardEvents API allows you to request data programmatically HarvardEvents in CSV, iCalendar, JSON, JSONP, serialized PHP, RSS, or XML format. The API provides a RESTful interface, which means that you can query it using simple HTTP GET requests.

Nicely done! You’d think that, just down the road, MIT would be doing something similar. But if so I haven’t found it. So for now, the Boston hub includes way more Harvard events than MIT events.

Here’s hoping MIT will follow Harvard’s lead and equip its public calendars with standard data feeds.