On Oct. 29, Jennifer Herrera, the senior advisor for diversity initiatives, announced the launch of a new online classifieds service for the College, go/classifieds.
The initiative, a WordPress site launched last winter, will enable anyone with a Middlebury NetID to list an item for sale, restricting the market to a small, local area for students, faculty and staff, and guaranteeing the safety and security of the online marketplace.
This Library and Information Services (LIS) project is sponsored and administered by the Staff Council with additional advising from Human Resources. As the College becomes more and more digitized, with advents from MiddNotes to MiddBlog, go/classifieds marks the latest effort to update and expedite services that were previously dependent on print or people-to-people interactions.
Joe Antonioli, the manager of web and interactive digital media technologies and one of the developers of the project, explained the importance of the new service.
“[It] came about because the Middlebury community indicated that the most-missed feature of the printed MiddPoints newsletter was the classifieds,” said Antonioli.
While he and the rest of the team did not explicitly set out to cut down on posters across campus, moving classifieds from bulletin boards to message boards has the potential to reduce the clutter of fliers and signs decorated with take-away phone numbers on the walls of McCullough.
The service will also hopefully be an online substitute to be utilized for bartering that the College currently lacks, such as a rides board.
Chris Northrop ’13, a self-identified frequent consumer of many of the College’s online services, was enthused about the prospect of go/classifieds. He is hoping most for a forum to exchange rides.
“I’m really looking forward to taking advantage of the service, I hope it will provide me with an easier way to get home to New York City,” he said.
The site is currently active and running at go/classifieds.
New Site Lets Community Buy and Sell
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