Inside the Media Hub: Empowering Creativity at OSU
Story by Kallyn Zaner
The Media Hub is a technical unit inside of the university’s UIT Academic Technologies team. Located on the 2nd floor of the Valley Library, the Media Hub offers and serves as a vital resource for all students and faculty at OSU. The Media Hub is far more than just a center for distributing equipment, it is a creative powerhouse dedicated to providing constant support, tools and resources for academically driven pursuits from assisting with course related student media projects to aiding faculty recording and capturing lectures or tutorials.
The Media hub is a unique central resource for technological equipment and conversation-based support. Staff members don't just “check out” cameras or microphones, they engage with the users to ensure they are receiving equipment that will support all their needs and support on how to use it. Whether it's choosing the proper lenses, lighting setups, or audio equipment, the Media hub staff and employees take their time to guide students and faculty through these processes, ensuring sufficient resources are provided to reach their goals and enable success.
Knowledgeable team members are available to help if technical difficulties arise. From troubleshooting issues, to offering advice on Adobe Creative Suite and other tools, the Media hub Team is there for any form of assistance.
The Media Hub provides various spaces for content production. There is a mini lab available for editing purposes, graphic design content, and digital creations. Six studio spaces are also available, free of charge, each offering unique contributions and capabilities such as photography, videography, simple audio recordings, or even full lecture and tutorial sessions. To further enhance the Media Hub’s creative and academic utility, digitization services are offered for music and documents, as well as DIY scanning.
Poster production is another popular service utilized within the Media hub, particularly used to support poster presentations for research and coursework. Students can utilize premade templates, upload their customized designs, and create high- quality posters that consistently meet academic standards. The team ensures that OSU is well represented professionally on campus and at national and international events, avoiding blurry images or logos, pixelation, or inappropriate font. This poster service includes standard paper, foam core mounted, large photo prints, and even some fabric prints.
The Media hub team provides an overview of the various resources available for every college and department at OSU. Through informative workshops and classroom training sessions, students have access to presentation spaces with a professional setting and environment to practice for class speeches, defenses, and other forms of presentations. These spaces are very valuable for graduate students seeking out opportunities to polish their delivery in a realistic and professional setting.
Each year the Media Hub serves thousands of students and faculty. On an average year they print around 3,200 posters, check out 17,300 pieces of equipment, and offer various workshops and tutorials hosted by the Media Hub.
The Media Hub is operated by a dedicated group made up of 22 student employees and 2 professionals under the leadership and guidance of Teresa Preddy. These student employees are gaining real world experience in different forms of media production, videography, and graphic design- all skills that can be proudly showcased on their resumes. The Media Hub team collaborates with other student organizations and supports campus events through the art of visual storytelling.
With a strong, active online presence through the official Media hub website, as well as an Instagram account, the team engages with the University community to bring more students and faculty to the Hub. At its core, the Media hub is more than a place, it is a collaborative environment where students and faculty come together to create, communicate, and achieve, to overall represent Oregon State University in a creative and positive light.
