The Asian Studies Program is changing its name to the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Program at Dartmouth, and this seems an opportunity to change many of the ways the Program has been represented before now. Most obvious of those means of representation that we can change very advantageously is the website. Until now, ASP has been like most Dartmouth departments in the Arts and Sciences, putting up a website with minimal information, which rapidly goes out of date.
Faculty tend to treat their own websites as window dressing.
But that is probably not the way you think of websites that have turned out to be extremely useful to you, or at least piqued your interest in some way that influenced you over a long course of time. For students websites are the first and most comfortable sources of information. Either those websites function as inviting doorways and create new levels of interest for the students, or the websites are brick walls that students have to scale with difficulty. Inert websites do not become Dartmouth, which has earned a reputation for being in the forefront of new learning and communications media. More important, a well-functioning website can become a uniquely powerful tool for promoting communications among our majors and faculty, for providing students with timely information about possibilities on and off campus for study and research, and for facilitating the development and dissemination of faculty research and writing.