Daniel Sweat
Features Editor
Picture the scene: it’s the second semester of your first year at The College of Wooster. Spring has sprung, and the prospect of finals looms in the distance.
You, being the liberal arts kid that you are, signed up for a class about post-war poetry for this semester, and your professor likes to think outside the box. In fact, rather than assigning a boring old paper as you second-to-last assignment, he asks you to record a podcast about your favorite post-war poet.
You think back on all the maestros of verse you’ve read throughout the year, and you settle on a poem to talk about. You’re ready to go.
But wait. How are you going to record a podcast with only your laptop? Of course, you could just sit in your dorm room and talk at your computer like a weirdo, but what if your roommate walks in and ruins your whole recording? Besides, the audio in your room sounds like you’re talking in a fishbowl anyway. Ugh, what a conundrum.
This story might seem like a far-fetched fantasy, but it did actually happen to me. I wish the digital media room was around when I was taking that class. The room is a relatively new thing around here, but it fulfills a need that’s been on campus for a while. Students are encouraged, both inside and outside of class, to be as creative as they can be, but beyond that encouragement there’s little else someone could do to achieve their goal. Until now.
The digital media room in Andrews Library has a sound-proof room where you can record audio, whether it’s for class or not. They also offer a plethora of other equipment and spaces to help you achieve your #DigitalMediaGoals. Need to edit a video? They’ve got you covered. Need a place to plan out your next project? They’ve got that too.
Say, for instance, you and your friends have to do a group project together for your French class. You could, of course, just record yourself talking to your friend in front of a wall in French, but where’s the fun in that? Wouldn’t it be just a little bit cooler to record yourself in front of a green screen and then put pictures of the Eiffel Tower behind you when you edit? Well, at the one-button recording studio, it’s possible.
They also have a whole mess of computers that you and your group mates can use to edit your projects. Think of it like a study room with more helpful equipment.
The digital media rooms are not yet in their final forms; the library plans to add to them further this semester to make them even more useful for students. But if you find yourself in need of a place to work on multimedia projects in peace and quiet, check them out.
One response to “Digital media rooms help students with creative projects”
Thanks, Daniel, for writing about our exciting new space. It’s great that you point out — by way of your own experience! — how students might be able to use these resources. I’m the new Digital Scholarship Librarian at the College and the Director of CoRE, and as the person who’s been getting the space up and running I’d hoped to take this chance to add a few notes of clarity to your piece.
What you’re referring to as the “digital media room[s] in Andrews Library” is actually a suite of rooms that we’re calling the Digital Studio. As you point out, there’s a production planning room with an interactive white board, as well as a One-Button Studio and a Sound Studio. (Unfortunately, none of the spaces are soundproofed, as your article states, but we’re working on that part!) The One-Button Studio is designed to make video capture of presentations easy: slide shows, static presentations, or (yes!) even green screen capture. Users just need to bring in a properly formatted thumb drive (needs to be File Allocation Table, FAT, format) and follow the on-screen and in-room instructions to record themselves. Most afternoons I have CoRE Consultants who can help with the OBS or the Sound Studio. Any of these rooms can be reserved using the Connect Daily system (connectdaily.wooster.edu) but they’re also available on a first-come, first-served basis. They’re even open for studying, but media production uses will get priority for obvious reasons.
In addition to these media production spaces there’s what I call the Digital Studio proper where there are, indeed, “a whole mess of computers.” There are five stations (to be precise), three of which have dual monitors for extra screen real estate. Here’s where you’d bring your raw video or audio files for editing and production. If you need help with that sort of thing the CoRE Consultants are available, as are Student Technology Associates who are at the Digital Media Bar in the CoRE (near the Gault entrance in Andrews).
As you say, the Digital Studio is not yet complete. Some detail about that: we’ll be…
— adding software to the machines to increase the capacity of Wooster students to edit their digital media.
— adding sound proofing to the walls to help the acoustics.
— building a website that gives you all of the information you need to reserve and run these spaces.
— adding some custom-built furniture to the OBS.
We joke that we’re ready for use, just not ready for prime time. So I encourage folks to check us out. Call it beta testing. Also I should say that we cannot guarantee “peace and quiet” all the time: it’s a green (collaboration) zone, so talking will happen. Think of it as the background noise to creative genius. Or something.