Report highlights successes of The Wallace Center

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A. Sue Weisler

TWC Impact 2013-14 uses personal stories to showcase how The Wallace Center has helped students, faculty and staff achieve academic, professional and personal goals.

The Wallace Center is much more than a university library. It’s a place where students, faculty and staff can achieve more, explore more, give more and connect more with information, technology and their peers around the world.

More: That’s the central message of The Wallace Center’s recently released report: TWC Impact 2013-14.

“Since its formation five years ago, The Wallace Center has become the interdisciplinary intersection of the campus, supporting student and faculty success regardless of discipline, in a technology and culturally rich, socially meaningful environment,” said Lynn Wild, associate provost for Faculty Career Development and The Wallace Center. “The center will continue to leverage current and new assets and capabilities to meet the needs of our students and faculty who inspire us to do more.”

The report uses personal stories to showcase how Rochester Institute of Technology’s Wallace Center over the last year has helped students, faculty and staff achieve academic, professional and personal goals.

Under the heading of “Achieve More,” the report tells the story of Andrzej Lubaszka. As a student employee at the center’s RIT Production Services, he gained highly valuable work experience as part of a team designing the RIT SportsZone Live HD production trailer.

Under “Explore More,” we learn how photographic illustration major Christian Whitworth uses the center’s collection of historical and contemporary photography books to do research and inspire his own work.

And under the heading “Connect More,” is the story of how a relationship born at New Faculty Orientation led College of Imaging Arts and Sciences Professor Josh Owen to a successful collaboration with TWC’s photography studio for his internationally-renowned Metaproject.

The report also highlights the center’s accomplishments during the year, including:

• The inaugural Destination Intersession that in January offered faculty 20 workshops and presentations on teaching, technology and research;
• The acquisition of the Kelmscott Press for the Cary Graphic Arts Collection;
• A global resources librarian who works with 1,300 students of RIT’s international campuses;
• More than 300 hours of captioning support for RIT’s deaf and hard-of-hearing students;
• Several industry awards for creation of RIT websites; and
• The April launch of RIT Scholar Works, a new tool to preserve and promote research and creativity.

The Wallace Center is unique among university library systems in that it is comprised of several units with similar missions, including RIT Libraries; video, Web and photography production services; faculty development; and RIT Press, an academic publishing enterprise.