Engaging students through the arts and humanities: meaningful programming

Meaningful, accessible, and assessable programming becomes meaningless if no one attends. Proactive marketing is needed, aiming to engage diverse students with interests in all fields. This chapter provides ideas about programming that can be adapted to a variety of situations, which leads to a discussion of the long-term goals of marketing the academic library; these goals should lead to departmental eminence, as well as desirable outcomes such as presentations, publications, and grants. The evolving role of the academic librarian coincides with the evolution that is taking place in the arts and humanities. Newly emerging majors and areas of specialization combine the liberal and fine arts with technology. Students graduating in these areas hope to find a future in new, lucrative fields like music technology, design, computer animation, and technical writing. Librarians have championed these disciplines from their inception, even when parent institutions ignore them due to shortsighted emphasis on STEM at the expense of all other fields. Librarians can lead the way by offering arts and humanities programming that sparks and then maintains the vitality of these fields.