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The "official" Skidmore College Dracula Web Page is the result of several wonderful collaborations among Skidmore folk.  First, the idea for the page would never have festered in my brain had it not been for a wonderfully thoughtful and generous gift to the College in 2000 of a collection of vampire and horror material: books, playbills and other ephemera, toys, gimmicks, marketing tools, etc. by Chris Giancarlo '81.  Chris was a student of mine many years ago in a course in which we studied Dracula, a novel on which I had published a bit and taught quite a number of times in different contexts.

Chris collaborated with Ruth Copans, Skidmore's Rare Book Librarian and now College Librarian to get the material to Scribner Library.  Ruth recognized the potential value of the material as a teaching tool and a resource for students.

I have had the great good fortune to have collaborated with others at Skidmore over the course of this summer: first, chronologically, I participated in a faculty workshop to develop honors forum courses in which I worked on developing a one-credit honors add-on, focusing on Dracula, to my section of Introduction to Fiction; as I began to plot out the goals for student learning for that element of the course, I began to consider what might be the most active types of engagement students could have with the material in the collection - of course, a library exhibit in time for Halloween, as Ruth Copans suggested, would be one such opportunity. 

From there, it was no great leap to think about developing a web page to feature the material in the collection, a web page on which students themselves would work, to which, in fact, they could contribute.  As a result, I sought and received further Skidmore support in the form of an AT&T Faculty Initiative Grant, which provides me with essential assistance from members of the Center for Information Technology Services and the Library here, Beth DuPont, John Cosgrove, and Bill Duffy, as well as funds a specialized student assistant for me in the fall. 

More collaborations!

Finally, I was allowed to participate in a UWW/CITS workshop on developing web-based courses for distance learning, with the goal that I would eventually put either the Dracula segment or the full fiction course on line.  Here, collaborations extended to Phylise Banner, instructor par excellence of that workshop, Corky Reinhart, co-coordinator and Director of UWW, as well as to all the other faculty-as-students in the workshop.  And here, I became entranced by the current capacity to identify, locate, and incorporate resources seemingly without limit, recognizing at the same time both that such trances can lead to loss of one's sense of time and even purpose -- one can follow links ad infinitum -- and that critical analysis of material out there is essential both to making appropriate choices (realizing what is just junk) and to sanity!

This web page, then, is an ongoing collaboration, awaiting its ultimate (in all senses) collaborators - the Skidmore students who will use and contribute to it.  It begins with some very basic resources enabling students to have on-line discussions, both synchronous and asynchronous, and to follow and build links to material "out there" about Dracula, vampires, the gothic genre - in written form and well as in films.  I am extremely excited to discover more about the use of the web and, especially the degree of its effectiveness in engaging student interest and energy.   Of course, when you're collaborating with Dracula... need I say more!

Phyllis A. Roth, Professor of English
PMH 308, x 5176
"paroth@skidmore.edu"