Once you’ve logged in, the first thing you need to do is select the academic year you want to work on.

After doing that, you’ll see a large list of menu options on the left that direct you to all the data you can provide about your Center. Start with the top link, NRC INFO. This will allow you to verify the name of your center, make sure the correct schools are associated, and provide a description of your center. This description will be the first thing most users see about your center, so make it good. Above the description box is a “view” link that will bring up the front page of your center on the “end user” section so you can see exactly how it looks. Additionally, you’ll want to provide mailing addresses and URLs for each of the schools associated with your center (the addresses and URLs are for your Center, not the school as a whole).

Next, you can either click “edit” on the bottom of the page below “Languages” or follow the second link on the left. This takes you to the Languages & Degrees page. Here, you’ll select all the languages associated with your center, as well as providing information about what degrees (if any) are offered in each language. This will be a very helpful resource for perspective students as they browse the web portal.

The next two sections, Language Courses and Area Studies, have both an Offerings and a Catalog option. The Offerings sections are Academic Year specific and deal with what courses you offer each semester. The Catalogs display a generic list of courses that your center offers, including courses that aren't offered every year. The Catalog should show courses that will be offered in the future, regardless of how often they're offered or when they were last offered. You can get started on the two Offerings sections by using the IRIS import function. If you click “Import” at the top of the Offerings pages, you’ll be taken to the page that will import your data from IRIS. You can either import all the data for your center, or you can filter which data to import by University or Data Type. This may take a few minutes, but it’ll get you a good start. It’s important to note, however, that each of these sections allow you to enter additional data beyond what’s available in IRIS. You can provide links to external websites for the specific item (like a course’s website, for example) as well as providing a description of the item. The more of this you provide the more interesting the site will be. There is also a system in place to allow you to upload a csv (Excel) file for Language Offerings and Area Studies, in the same format as many of you enter your courses in IRIS. The Offerings and Catalog pages also speak to each other somewhat, allowing you to do an initial populating of your catalog from your offerings list and vice-versa. If you click on the “Catalog” link for either Language courses or Area Studies, there is an explanation of how to do this.

The next three menu options (Research, Outreach, and Products) are fairly self explanatory. For almost all of these (all but Research) you can get started by populating data from your IRIS submissions, using the same steps in the previous paragraph. These options also have many additional pieces of data that we encourage you to provide.

The next sections (Partnerships, Study Abroad, FLAS, Contacts, and Library) are some very important content that isn’t available on IRIS. In Partnerships, please provide the name and URL of any school or organization you’ve worked with in the past. In Study Abroad, you can detail where and when there are Study Abroad programs affiliated with your Center. In FLAS, you can describe the nature of any FLAS fellowships offered by your Center. Finally, in Contacts, you can provide public contact information for any members of your Center that are willing to be contacted by members of the community to provide services (translation, interviews, speaking engagements, etc). The Library section allows you to write a few paragraphs about the nature of your center's Library offerings. It’s very important to remember that this data is public, but it will be an excellent resource for members of the media, business, or government sectors to find an expert in a particular world area or language.

The next three sections are less structured and allow you to be a little bit more creative. The Documents section can be used however you’d like: you can upload course syllabi, videos of visiting speakers, power point presentations… whatever you think people would appreciate. The same can be said about the Images and Links sections. You can provide images of your staff, your logo, or your campus and links to any websites you think are relevant and interesting. Whatever you think people would like to see. It’s important to note that the image marked “primary” will appear above your primary contacts on your main page, so chose a nice picture that represents your center.

The final three menu options are pretty self-explanatory. In Results, provide numerical data that sums up your center. In this section, please provide numbers for everything. You may, however, chose which values you'd like to be publicly viewable, by clicking the "hidden" check box on items you'd like to conceal. We ask you to enter numbers for all applicable fields so that they can all be taken into account on the user end where the full impact and accomplishments of the centers are displayed.

Finally, there’s the User Accounts page. Here, you can add logins for other people from your center. Only one account for each NRC is the “primary” account: this means only one account can add new users. At first, the account provided in this email is your primary account, but that can be changed.

Once you have a feel for the place, please start entering data in earnest. The whole point of Beta Testing is that hopefully you’ll find the bugs and problems that I’ve missed. The more time you spend on the Web Portal, the more help you’ll be to me as I try to get the Portal ready to go live. Please feel free to send along suggestions, comments or ideas, as well. We’ll obviously be putting the majority of our emphasis on bug fixes for the first few weeks of beta testing, but we’ll certainly be looking at new ideas at the same time.