Celebrate your information, not your institution.
The best source for design ideas for your humanities portal is to look at other scholarly portals, lots of them. Find a straightforward, conventional, rich design (lots of information always in view), and follow that design. The general idea is: don't get it original, get it right.
Devote all your screen space to what will directly help the user, not to logos, not for big type for the name of the Director, not for other administrative debris. Celebrate your information, not your institution.
Try to put at least 200 links on the opening screen, as do many news portals. Arts & Letters Daily, the "intellectual's portal," has about 600 links on their single screen.