If you’re a regular to the library, you know about our study rooms — a great place to watch a video or work on a group project.  And now there are even more possibilities.

Room 145 has been equipped with the Dragon Naturally Speaking software, a speech-recognition tool, courtesy of our friends in Student Support Services.  If typing a paper is difficult or uncomfortable for you, Dragon can ease the problem.  You speak into the program naturally, and it figures out word spacing and the commands you give it, translating them into text.  The program has a brief setup phase where it acclimates itself to your unique voice – and that profile grows and strengthens as you continue to use it, matching your words more and more precisely over time.

Room 147 now has video production software.  The entire Adobe Creative Design suite – including video tools Premiere Pro, SoundBooth, and MediaEncoder, are part of it.  All of this software is available to you through IUWare, but it takes a fast computer with a lot of memory to run it all well.  This computer is an excellent setup for using it.  And if you have Creative Design suite on your home computer, you can easily work on a video here and finish it up at home.  Additionally, a green screen is in the room, which you can use for filming special projects.

These specialized tools have priority use in the rooms, since they are not available elsewhere in the library.  So if you are in rooms 145 or 147 studying and a student needs to edit a video or use the Dragon software, library staff will need to ask you to relocate.  Also, the equipment in the room can be scheduled for use in 2 hours time slots, so just contact Mandi (mmoning@iue.edu) or ext. 311 to make it happen!