To: All Faculty & All Academic Professionals & All Civil Service Staff
           <everybody@illinois.edu> 
    From: "Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research" <ovcr@illinois.edu>

Reply-To: jsteinfe@illinois.edu
 Subject: MASSMAIL - Participate in Multimedia Survey

To: Faculty and Staff

The Data Stewardship Initiative and the Center for Multimedia Excellence are working jointly to 
identify multimedia collections to better understand management and preservation requirements 
on campus. The groups will contact faculty and staff to help the campus more clearly understand 
the needs of researchers, multimedia producers and archivists.

We ask that you participate in these efforts by responding to a brief online survey found at 
http://go.illinois.edu/popcensus. This survey seeks to identify collections of audio, film, video, 
and still images of value for research, instructional, and outreach purposes. 

A more detailed census of media collections will follow, conducted through interviews and visits 
to buildings across campus by students from the Graduate School of Library and Information 
Science. In addition, the Data Stewardship Initiative will conduct a second survey focused on non-
media based research data holdings on campus later this spring.

The Data Stewardship Initiative consists of the University Library, Office of the Chief Information 
Officer, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, and other campus stakeholders. It was created 
in response to the Stewarding Excellence at Illinois report that recommended that the campus 
develop a baseline understanding of the activities and needs for data services, curation, and 
stewardship. Details are available at http://datasteward.illinois.edu.

The Center for Multimedia Excellence, comprised of campus multimedia professionals, seeks to 
identify individuals and campus units that hold digital and analog media collections in order to 
develop a comprehensive strategy for the preservation of media used for research and non-
research purposes. Details are available at http://go.illinois.edu/mediasurveyinfo.

These efforts are vital to the University's research, education, and public engagement missions. 
Increasingly, funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation are requiring grant 
recipients to better manage and provide access to data generated by projects. 

Even when not required, long-term data storage and accessibility are useful to researchers who 
generate data, as well as to scholars who later use the data in their own work. As a major 
research university, we must identify ways to improve the ability of our researchers to access and 
store data, and we must develop a comprehensive strategy to preserve and share our rich 
multimedia collections here at Illinois.

Ravishankar Iyer
Interim Vice Chancellor for Research

Paula Kaufman
University Librarian and Dean of Libraries Paula Kaufman

Robin Kaler
Associate Chancellor for Public AffairsThis mailing approved by:
The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research

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