At Lamont Library: Foreign Travel at Reduced Fares

Language Resource Center at Lamont Library offers high-tech avenues into new worlds-in a cozy setting

What is the most cosmopolitan spot in Harvard Square? The Café Pamplona? Au Bon Pain? Or is it the new, state-of-the-art language lab in the penthouse of Lamont Library?

Hands down, the language lab is the winner. There you can listen to Italian opera, read German poetry, or watch French films.

The new Language Resource Center was opened last December, replacing the tried and true but aging 1959 lab in the basement of Boylston Hall. While the new facility serves the same courses, faculty, and students as the old, there are lots of dramatic changes: information delivery is now digital; the carrels are an unlikely combination of cozy and high-tech; even the view has changed, from the shoes and knees of passersby to a sweeping vista of the Yard.

Rather than waiting for a single videotape to be made available or for space in a crowded viewing area, students can now watch foreign language programs at one of 34 PC stations. These course-assigned tapes are stored on a video server and are accessible throughout the Center. Within seconds, students may switch from one assignment to another or move from any point in a videotape to another without winding or rewinding. Every student may watch the same video at the same time but at different points in the video.

Students can view lectures or use wireless headphones to watch international broadcasts. And, from a central console, faculty can test students and listen to them perform exercises.

In addition, the thickly carpeted, brightly colored Center also has two viewing rooms for small classes or groups, a music room with CD/cassette recorders, two carrel areas for group study, two stations for students who use wheelchairs, and two additional stations for students with low vision or repetitive strain injury.

There's no espresso machine, but there are newspapers and magazines from all over the world, and an atmosphere that makes the learning of a foreign languages feel more like a journey than a chore.