The Center for Multimedia Excellence is a voluntary effort at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to provide a gathering place for media creators to share knowledge, content and vision for the future of our campus.
From the menus above the CME provides access to shared multimedia resources developed through our campus collaborations and working groups. We encourage you to get involved and contribute to the efforts toward a more cohesive media strategy at the University. Our monthly meeting and other related events are posted in the calendar section in the upper right corner of this page.
The key to maintaining and extending the University’s reputation for academic excellence lies in offering a global audience the core of the University: the minds and thoughts of our faculty and students. To remain competitive, we need to reach current and prospective students, research partners, alumni, donors, and the public in new and innovative ways.
We propose a University wide digital media solution to broadly enable:
- Media creation for education, research, and outreach
- Accessible media for all audiences in compliance with state and federal law
- Distribution that maintains our intellectual property and identity
- Preservation of our digital heritage
We must consider digital media with the same care as our physical library assets. In our present condition we are failing to preserve our digital heritage, and we are diluting the University’s identity as students and faculty look to YouTube, Flickr and other external services to meet their increasing demand for rich media tools.
Voluntary efforts have fostered significant inter-disciplinary collaboration towards identifying strategies, best practices, and needs. Pockets of multimedia expertise exist in some units, but they are not generally available. Dedicated resources consisting of staff and infrastructure are now needed to scale these efforts and services to all faculty and students across the University.
If realized, we will provide students with enhanced educational environments benefitting diverse learning styles. Faculty will be able to reach new audiences in learning and research via tools that reside at Illinois. Alumni and future students will see the vibrancy of our campus community. The general public will experience unprecedented access to informal learning opportunities provided by Illinois. All of this is achievable if we leverage our strengths to develop an end-to-end solution that allows faculty and students to create, catalog, and distribute their knowledge in an enduring digital athenaeum.
CME has established working groups to explore topics related to multimedia production and preservation. For more on the working groups, see this page.
Finally the CME’s Principles.
