How Vanderbilt Runs Media Equipment Checkout for Students

Vanderbilt Student Communications (VSC) is the independent non-profit that governs student media at Vanderbilt University. Chartered in 1967 specifically to give students editorial independence from the university, VSC oversees 15 student-produced media organizations sharing one equipment pool, and has run checkout for that equipment through Reftab’s self-service portal since 2023. 

Chris Carroll, VSC’s Director of Student Media, serves as the corporation’s chief operational officer. Carroll is responsible for strategic planning along with fiscal, legal and logistical operations, supervising professional staff, and advising students as VSC’s principal journalism educator. The Director of Student Media role combines software procurement and the newsroom. It also means VSC evaluates and buys its own software rather than routing decisions through Vanderbilt University IT. Whatever system Carroll chose had to work for VSC’s small staff, on a non-profit budget, without depending on the university’s infrastructure or approval process. 

A solution with specificity 

Before Reftab, VSC tracked its cameras and lenses through a paper binder kept in the equipment room. Students couldn’t see what was already reserved, and staff fielded availability questions constantly, by phone or in person. Carroll evaluated several asset management platforms to replace it. Most were sized for IT departments managing thousands of devices, with capabilities a media department would never touch. He wanted one specific feature – a self-service request portal – at a price a non-profit budget could justify. 

“We’re a real outlier in that we use a sliver, a fraction of the robust capacity of Reftab,” Carroll says. The partnership works because the platform never requires VSC to use more than it needs to reach its goals. Reftab is built for simplicity that scales.

A system for equipment accountability 

Some of VSC’s inventory carries real financial weight. “We’re basically sending a student out of the room with about $12,000 worth of camera equipment to shoot a football game,” Carroll says. A separate tier of equipment, including long lenses and advanced camera bodies, is available to be reserved by experienced users only.  

Every checkout now captures a digital acknowledgment of responsibility from the student taking the gear, replacing the paper form that once lived in the same binder as the reservation log. VSC has not had to formally act on one of those records — the history is minor, self-reported damage, nothing close to a lost or stolen camera — but Carroll credits the record itself with some of that outcome. “I think it makes a difference that they know, we know; they signed this thing, we have a record of it,” he says. 

Infrastructure that survives turnover 

Every VSC division is run by students, and Carroll’s own staff is small enough that the whole operation changes over on a short cycle. That made self-service onboarding a requirement, not a convenience. New students are added as sub-users and set up their own accounts from an email invite. Outgoing student leaders show incoming leaders the system informally. “We haven’t had to do any kind of specific training for it. It’s so intuitive,” Carroll says. 

Usage patterns align with the academic calendar: about 40 active student accounts a week into fall semester, spiking to over a hundred around football season before falling to zero each summer as students leave the Vanderbilt campus. VSC’s asset management runs on the same configuration year after year, without Carroll’s team having to rebuild it each cycle. 

Customized and responsive 

This year, as VSC split equipment operations across two sides of campus, Carroll needed a new layer of access — a student leader able to check gear in and out for a limited set of equipment, without full administrative permissions. Carroll raised it on a support call that had started over something unrelated. By the end of the call, Reftab’s team had built it: a new sub-user role called “Photo Director,” scoped to exactly what VSC needed. “Mike very quickly said, ‘Oh yeah, click here, click there,’ and we created a new sub-user category,” Carroll says. “It was awesome that by just asking, my wish came true that quickly.” 

“We’re happy customers,” Carroll says — and he has become an informal reference well beyond Vanderbilt. Carroll is a former executive director of the College Media Association, past president of College Media Advisers, and a 2009 inductee into the College Media Advisers Hall of Fame. Thirty years into a career spent advising student newsrooms nationally, he still hears the “how do you track your cameras” question from peers running student media at other universities. Reftab is the answer he gives. 

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