"AV services are no more… Long live the New Media Center!!" Howard Spivak, Director for Library Systems & Academic IT"The demise of the Audiovisual Center and the transition from AV to New Media Center was much more than a change of name and change of location. Services shifted from a 1950s analog-based service model to a digitally-oriented one that will serve the College well into the future. That this was undertaken and successfully completed in the midst of the move to the new building was a remarkable achievement–that it was achieved without a single word of faculty complaint or campus uproar was a small miracle that can be directly attributed to the skills of Harold Wilson." Howard Spivak, Director for Library Systems & Academic IT
When planning for the new Library began--and even after this planning was well underway--it was anticipated that the Electronic Campus Project would be completed before the new Library was ready. Many decisions about the building were made using this assumption, and one of them was to exclude space for housing AV equipment and operating an equipment delivery service. (In all likelihood, even if the College had anticipated the delay in completing the Electronic Campus Project, it is improbable that the new Library would have been designed to support what had become a space-intensive and outdated approach to meeting the College's audiovisual equipment needs, that is, the centralized housing and delivery of audiovisual equipment, chiefly monitors and VCRs whose costs have steeply declined.)
In the spring 2000 the College accepted the Library's proposal to equip departments and other College units to meet their own audiovisual needs by supplying them with equipment or enabling them to share equipment using building-centered equipment closets. After a year of inventorying all existing AV equipment and assessing campus needs, in the spring 2002 Student Technology Fee money was used to purchase equipment to augment existing machines. In July the chief librarian wrote to the entire campus, apprising them of the new plan. In the late summer and early fall, New Media Center staff distributed the equipment across the campus.
This new approach has proven very successful. New Media Center staff are there to assist when a department has difficulties with its equipment, and to help with maintenance issues.