WAAL 2007: NMUmaniTies: an interdisciplinary blog for liaisons

"Tying together Art & Design, Communication & Performance Studies, and Modern Languages & Literature"
http://nmumanities.blogspot.com
Krista Clumpner

At NMU Librarians are faculty and serve as liaisons. Krista has Art & Design, CAPS, and Modern Languages.

Goal: Communication
-- between library liaison (Krista) and departments
-- among faculty and staff within and across the departments

Art & Design (31 facstaff)
-- studio arts
-- arts ed
-- art history

Communication and Performance Studies (24 facstaff)

Modern Languages (14 facstaff)

The departments are spread out geographically all over campus in three different buildings. Since NMU is on "the balmy southern shore of Lake Superior," walking across campus can be a challenge for much of the year.

How to improve communication? Try a blog...

See Feb 2007 CiL article by Judy Hauser on Web2.0 tools

Why a Blog?
-- Quick
-- Easy
-- Cheap
-- Everyone can participate

How quick?
Depends on how much you want to put into it...

How easy?
To quote: "Easy as 1-2-3"

How cheap?
If you have a computer and internet, it's "just" your time and energy...

Participation?
Authors and Viewers --> readers and commenters --> dialog
Viewers becoming Authors
promoting dialog between faculty --> interdisc. activities

What's she posting?
-- announcements
-- new acquisitions
-- "book of the week"
-- netlibrary stats
-- etc.

What's next?
Dialog, we hope
-- asking questions to promote responses

Promotion
-- email announcements
-- promote to students (laptop university)
-- personal communication in the fall

Add graphics
-- book covers

Move to local server (maybe)

If this works to promote faculty communication, Krista gets "two gold stars"