Wallace Library debuts digital media site

Libraries have always been synonymous with information. But now that information will be at your fingertips, wherever you have an Internet connection.

From the deepening enigma of the egg nebula to photos of RIT freshmen in 1938, RIT’s Wallace Library offers up an array of digital media in its new Digital Media Library.

A screenshot from the Digital Media Library Web site

Created by library staff, the Digital Media Library uses technology developed by MIT, tweaked to RIT’s needs. It holds PDF documents, images, video and audio—a virtual institutional repository, storing, saving and showing to the world the vast range of RIT knowledge and research.

“The RIT Digital Media Library is a tool that will support RIT’s scholarship, research and teaching,” says Chandra McKenzie, library director.

The Digital Media Library was created out of a need and desire to develop a single place where digital media could be found. The library surveyed the RIT community last spring and found 80 percent of faculty were extremely interested in accessing and contributing to a digital archive containing the academic and artistic output of the RIT community.

Here’s how it works: Each college or administrative department/division is set up as a community in the Digital Media Library. Through one appointed administrator, they control the content that is submitted.

Content can be made available to the public or restricted to the RIT community and is searchable from the Web site at ritdml.rit.edu.

Four colleges are currently beta testing the Digital Media Library—Liberal Arts, CAST, Science and Golisano. However, it’s ready for any department or college that wants to set up its own community, McKenzie says. Communities can submit new documents (such as pre-prints/postprints, theses, projects, conference proceedings, monographs, working papers, conference papers, technical reports/documentation) but due to storage limitations, past works can’t yet be added.

Contact McKenzie at 5-2566 or cvmwml@rit.edu.