Stakeholder: Liza Sacheli Lloyd
WebRedo Contact: Joe A.

Center for the Arts requirements focus on:

• Calendar and events services
• Improved search functionality and navigation
• A modern online/real time box office system
• Customization
• Social networking
• Tagging

Right now, the Arts are one of the seven main areas at the op level of navigation off the home page. In the web makeover, we want to ensure that the Arts continue to be included as a top level of the College’s web presence. The Arts at Middlebury play a unique role as an area of the College in that the Arts are important to both a campus and community audience.  We’re a connector between students, faculty, staff, and community members.  We’re also a connector between academic disciplines, enrichment pursuits, and leisure interest.  Because the Arts are relevant to such a broad cross-section of the community, our outreach should be represented early on in the viewer’s experience with Midd on the web.

One of our biggest wishes for the future is that the Arts at Midd’s presence on the web can better reflect the vibrancy, the energy, the vitality of the programs and people here.  We’d like a web framework that allows more freedom, more excitement… we’d like to see sound and movement on the new site.  The ability to better incorporate audio and video would allow us to show what happens here more effectively. Obviously, artists are people who value free expression!

Calendar: An events calendar is, and will always be, a really important part of the Arts’ web presence. The Events at Middlebury area, and the way it interfaces with Resource 25, has always felt clunky and unfriendly.  We have an amazing amount of exciting stuff happening at Middlebury-there has got to be a way for the web to show that excitement in a way that’s easier to navigate and understand, that looks and sounds great too (pictures? sound?)  Maybe an events calendar could be more interactive, or have social networking compatibilities. What about a running marquee of events each day?

Search: Middlebury would benefit from a more effective/friendlier search functionality for the entire Midd web presence.

Navigation: There is great room for improvement in our web’s navigation strategy!  There is an opportunity to integrate different functions so that intuitive sequences of info unfold to the user.  For example, one of our faculty envied a school where it was easy to find each academic department, then once you located a particular faculty member, you could see what classes they were teaching, and that page linked right up to the relevant course catalog listings; that linked right to registration, etc.

Box Office: We would like to see Middlebury invest in new ticketing software that would run in real time, and be hooked up to exchange critical information with Banner. Right now we operate on a separate system, and we have work-arounds to make ticket sales available on the web (NOT in real time).  If we ever got this functionality, we could be of real service to the entire campus community as a commercial portal for all kinds of services.

Customization: We would like to see our web presence have customization capability so that the various places we go electronically every day could be collated into my Midd web experience.

Social networking: We have an opportunity to strengthen our sense of community at Middlebury with technology.  In the era of Facebook, there are so many new and different ways to keep in touch.  How can Midd take advantage of that connectivity?

Tagging: We have a program we call “Curricular Connections” where we suggest links between the course curriculums each semester and the public arts offerings that are planned.  Each semester the online Curricular Connections brochure is organized thematically, with chapters devoted to any theme that emerges during that timeframe.  There is a connection between this thematically organized content and the tagging feature.