General Information

The Interactive Language Resource Center's  former namesake, the Language Laboratory, began in 1956 and has been in continuous operation since its opening. It was, for the most part, is a restricted reference laboratory open to students, faculty, and staff of the Departments of  French and Italian; German, Russian, Asian and Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures; Spanish and Portuguese; and Classics.

The lab had its beginnings with state-of-the-art technology of the era, vinyl stereophonic records and reel-to-reel tape. In the 1970s, the Language Lab received a major renovation and a Tanderg Language Learning system was purchased. This system allowed students and instructors to use audio cassette tapes for their listening materials and allowed for two-way conversation and peer listening and collaboration.

The 1990s brought about the first computers into the language lab. When Irvin Hall was undergoing a major renovation, the College of Arts and Sciences decided to bring the Language Laboratory up to snuff to compete with the rapidly changing world of technology. The Language Laboratory was briefly relocated to Hoyt Hall during renovations to Irvin Hall. During this time, the College decided to change the center's name to the Interactive Language Resource Center and inaugurate the new facility at the completion of renovations to the building in 1993-1994. Along with the traditional Tandberg audiocassette system, the ILRC would have a dedicated computer classroom as part of its new configuration.

In the late 1990s to early 2000s, the Tandberg eventually gave way to computers for the whole facility. Audio recordings were converted from audio cassette to MP3 files, Videos were converted from film, television, VHS tape, and Laserdiscs to digital formats. Today, the Interactive Language Resource Center is the technical hub of the four foreign language departments at Miami University. Students enrolled in language courses use the facility to supplement and enhance their foreign language courses with language specific Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) software, access Internet and network applications, and use various language learning specific software.

Funding

A huge amount of funding for new computers and equipment used by students in the ILRC is the direct result of successful applications from the Student Technology Fee program. Since the student technology fee was implemented, we have had an average success rate of 2-3 proposals every year to procure new equipment for students!  We are constantly thankful and grateful to the student community for being willing to support our facility with the Student Technology Fee program!

The Interactive Language Resource Center is also funded directly through the College of Arts and Science and is supported  through an endowment given to the ILRC by Mr. Phelps and Mrs. Beverly Wood. Without their gift, the ILRC would not be able to accomplish the language-related tasks that language students, faculty, and staff rely upon.

The ILRC Online

In 2001, Henry Montgomery (Class of 1960) provided a generous contribution to help the Classics Department in their efforts towards computerization and integrating computer technology into Classics courses. The Classics Department received a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help purchase a file server. Henry Montgomery and the Classics Department at Miami decided that it would be best for all the languages to share in this unique advance of technology and charged the Interactive Language Resource Center with finding the most cost effective solution to meet the needs of both the Classics Department as well as the needs of efficiently distributing information resources among all the foreign language departments.

The result was the first generation of the ILRC Online which was located at http://montgomery.cas.muohio.edu/.  With additional funds provided by the Interactive Language Resource Center and the College of Arts and Sciences, the Montgomery File Server was born. The original server consisted of  a 450MHz processor Macintosh G4 computer, a Macintosh X-Serve RAID which contains 1.26TB of data and ran Macintosh OS X 10.3 Server software.

In 2009, the second generation of the ILRC Online came to life through a $22,500 grant from Miami University’s Technical Fee Grant program. A new Macintosh X-Serve was purchased along with an 8TB Promise V-Track RAID storage array and  Macintosh OS X 10.6 Server software.

In 2014, the physical server was shut down, decommissioned, and all data was migrated to the university's virtual linux server clusters, using Amazon Web Services for its backend and Puppet software for maintenance, updates, and software pushes. 

Attendance Figures

 ¹ On January 23, 2013, sometime between 10:00am and 11:00am, the ILRC logged a major milestone of the 1,000,000th student to visit the language center. The feat took 57 years to accomplish, according to the best estimate of student visits and attendance tracking over the years. Our current attendance tracking system is a SenSource people counter installed at the entrance of the ILRC. For each student coming and going, the SenSource tracks the figure and the data is compiled at the end of each semester.

² Beginning on March 16th, 2020, the COVID-19 international pandemic shut all university facilities down. For the 2020-2021 academic year, all classes were held remotely, but organizations and departments that were "front-facing student operations" (the ILRC was included in this determination) were to be open and available to any students who wished to remain on campus during the pandemic.

Center Directors

Since the inception of Miami's language laboratory and it's successor, the ILRC, there have been six of known directors of the facilities:

• 1956-1973: Robert Phillips
• 1973-1974: Michael Daniel
• 1974-1976: Peter Carels
• 1976-1994: Edward Plater
• 1994-1998: Charlotte Wharton
• 1998-present: Daniel E. Meyers