Campus recording spots offer students otherwise-unavailable opportunities

Michael Colin
Tue, 17 Feb 2015 02:44:53 +0000
Campus, 3-D printing, Digital Union, recording, studio, video

Chorsie Calbert uses the studio in the Denney Hall Digital Union to record his own music.
Credit: Michael Colin / Lantern reporter

Chorsie Calbert moved to the edge of his seat, pressed record and started to sing his rendition of “When Love Takes Over” by David Guetta featuring Kelly Rowland.

Calbert, a second-year in theater, was in the recording studio at the Denney Hall Digital Union. He said without the recording studios provided by the Digital Unions, he would not have the opportunity to record music.

“I didn’t have much experience in a recording studio until I came to Ohio State,” Calbert said. “It’s kind of a way for me to get used to what I sound like.”

The Digital Union in the basement of Denney Hall is one of the two newest Digital Union locations. The other is located in Enarson Classrooms Building. The Denney Hall location also offers a video conference room and OSU’s only one-button video recording studio that seeks to make producing videos user-friendly.

The first Digital Union location opened in 2004 on the third floor of what was then the Science and Engineering Library. Since then, four new locations have opened around campus, offering various technology to students.

The Digital Unions celebrated their 10th anniversary on campus last year with the opening of two new unions that cost more than $520,000.

Matt Rickly, a fourth-year in electrical engineering, works as a digital media student consultant at the Denney Hall Digital Union where he helps students with technology. “Students have used (the video recording studio) for group presentations when they need a video clip,” Rickly said.

Rickly said student organizations use the studio to record videos a

nd interviews, and professors use it to make online lectures, but he doesn’t think students are using the Denney Hall Digital Union fully.

“I just don’t think students know about it,” he said. “I know there’s a lot of people looking for studio space and time whenever they can get it. A good start would be to get teachers knowledgeable about this space because they can assign more things and spread the word to students.”

Although not every OSU student knows about the Digital Unions, the spaces are popular among their frequent users, said Queenie Chow, the Digital Union manager.

“For all of the Digital Unions, we actually have a 95 percent satisfaction rating,” she said. “We are getting extremely positive feedback about what we’ve been offering to the campus.”

Chow added that one part of the unions has been gaining attention recently, though. In about a month, the unions have had ?about 550 submissions to use the 3-D printer, she said, adding that it is logistically impossible to complete all of these print jobs. Other departments also offer printers.

Chow said she understands there will always be Digital Union “regulars” and students who might only need to visit once.

“We have roughly three times as many visits as we have unique users per month,” she said. “It pretty much means that on average, the people that do know about us will tend to come to our labs rather often to work on things.”

Chow said she hopes that the unions can keep growing, as they have over the past 10 years.

“We actually haven’t stopped expanding and adding new things,” she said.