Overview:
This project intends to perform an analysis of the role of the academic departmental website within the continually evolving University webspace and more broadly within larger inter-institutional initiatives in scholarly communications. The goal is to explore the ways and means of creating a methodology to allow Wesleyan’s academic departments both to more easily maintain sites similar to those which they presently maintain, and  more importantly to challenge the departments to take advantage of technology to improve communications and speed up administrative functions that are presently handled through older, paper-based technologies. I would like also to integrate previous work that I have directed in developing a collaborative link database for curricular use (Project CuRL, see http://www.wesleyan.edu/curl/ ) and our library’s work on developing subject guides to print and electronic resources organized by academic department. These projects have begun to reconceive the departmental web presence as not merely an administrative and public relations organ, but also as a vital academic resource that can serve as a discipline-specific portal to intellectual resources and conversations within the university and beyond.

     Despite recent trends toward the valorization of interdisciplinarity, the academic departments and programs and their virtual avatars, the departmental and program website, constitute a powerful nexus of forces within the university. These entities still represent to the outside world the most fundamental organizational units of the university. As the web becomes increasingly influential in the admissions process, there is a growing sense that the departmental website, once an optional and usually haphazard concoction, is increasingly influencing not only students’ decisions about whether to major in a particular department, but also and more significantly  each student’s decision to attend a certain school at all. In addition to the marketing issues that individual departments and the University as a whole face, there are administrative reasons to re-visit the web methods used by academic departments.  With the recent installation of PeopleSoft on campus, there are myriad opportunities for using the web to streamline many administrative functions that take place within academic departments. Wesleyan has already made significant in-roads into this area through an innovative on-line course registration system and student advising system. Part of my intent is to leverage much of this excellent work to provide flexible tools with which departments may accomplish administrative work that they currently do with primarily paper-based methods.

     Perhaps the largest challenge within this project, and therefore its most interesting aspect, is its desire to reimagine the relationship of the departmental website to the student’s experience of the curriculum, and to the faculty’s engagement in the larger intellectual communities of which they are highly productive and engaged participants.  As more and more of the scholarly content of the curriculum moves to electronic form both through commercially available databases (such as JSTOR) and through non-commercial and often idiosyncratically published venues (such as Stoa, H-Net, Merlot, and similar initiatives), wonderful opportunities abound for collecting and managing off-campus resources to serve our students’ education. Tools for collaborative link collection and management (such as CuRL) deployed at the departmental level, and ideally linked to emerging meta-collections of curricular content (e.g. Merlot, Project Isaac )  can provide invaluable help to faculty struggling to re-organize their teaching as students of the Internet Generation arrive on campus. Even as they serve formal curricular instruction, these collections can simultaneously provide majors with opportunities to explore the texts of any given specialized field within the department independently of the formal curriculum. 

     As a University, we are like many other institutions find ourselves struggling to make sense of how to leverage web technology to advance our goals. The departmental website intuitively feels to be about the right scope to advance the popular notion of providing customized portals to the student without individualizing each student’s experience of the curriculum to the point of losing all sense of community.

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