University of British Columbia’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre capitalizes on the confluence of several campus units to supplement library staffing. Services include writing and research, study skills, multimedia creation, and course tutoring, as well as labs and offices for the Centre for Teaching and Academic Group and the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies. http://www.ikebarberlearningcentre.ubc.ca/ Multimedia The focus on providing facilities for multimedia production is a recent phenomenon in ARL libraries, paralleling the rapidly increasing use of these media in faculty instruction and in student responses to classroom assignments. Specialized facilities in libraries tend to offer a vast array of equipment and software to use in-house. The software and equipment platforms supporting multimedia creation often impose a considerable learning curve that neither faculty nor students can easily master. The most robust, and therefore successful, multimedia centers are infused with skilled staff, excellent equipment, and well-considered training and user-support models. The Weigle Commons multimedia center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center is probably the most influential model among ARL libraries for multimedia programming. The center is run as both production facility and training space, and it attempts to train both students and faculty in new forms of multimedia. Center staff have learned that student multimedia production gets a boost when faculty have insight into technical capacities and limitations, storyboarding, editing, continuity, logic, etc., so that faculty are better equipped to assess and grade these new and important forms of expression. The Digital Media Lab at the University of North Carolina “offers an array of audio and video editing software and hardware to assist faculty and students with projects ranging from the integration of bird calls into an online course to the development of a documentary short film.” Assistance is available via trained staff. http://www.lib.unc.edu/house/mrc/pages/mediaLab/ The Faculty Exploratory at the University of Miami exposes faculty to options for incorporating new media into their course instruction. As an incentive to encourage faculty to use the program, the library funds new media teaching fellowships. http://merrick.library.miami.edu/digitalprojects/digitalprojects.html RLI 264 10 Learning and Research Spaces in ARL Libraries: Snapshots of Installations and Experiments ( C O N T I N U E D ) JUNE 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC
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