Media digitization initiative unveiled

IU President Michael McRobbie announced a $15 million initiative Tuesday to “digitize, preserve and make universally available” the University’s collections of video, recorded music and other materials assembled during its nearly 200-year history.

“This initiative will be of great importance to all campuses and many schools at IU by providing them with immediate Internet access to large amounts of material now almost inaccessible,” McRobbie said.

McRobbie announced the Indiana University Media Preservation and Digitization Initiative during his 2013 State of the University address in President’s Hall, located in Franklin Hall.

The $15 million initiative will be funded by the administrative offices of the President, the Provost and Research, McRobbie said.

McRobbie placed the initiative in the context of simultaneously meeting all fundamental academic missions: the creation of, dissemination of and the preservation of knowledge.

Vice President for Information Technology Brad Wheeler, Vice President for Research Jorge Jose and University Dean of Libraries Brenda Johnson will direct the MPDI, said McRobbie.

The initiative will provide research and education opportunities for the School of Informatics and Computing and the proposed Media School, McRobbie said.

“The huge amounts of textual, image and video data will present opportunities for study and projects in the graduate programs in data science and big data research,” McRobbie said. “The complex technical and policy issues involved in the conversion and preservation of these materials will also be subjects for study in the digital media curriculum that is planned to be offered jointly by the MSchool and SoIC.”

The principle recommendations of the MPDI will be incorporated into the IU Strategic Plan for the Bicentenary, said McRobbie.  

The MPDI will have a national and global impact, said McRobbie, allowing a vast amount of material at IU to be made “instantly and inexpensively available in digital form at any time not only to students, scholars and scientists throughout IU, but across the country and around the world.”

— Hannah Alani