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THE PINAKES PRESENTS: ARTStor
Today, your bibliophylax is going to take a look at ARTStor, the beautifully designed repository of art images available through many academic institutions. This screencast can also be viewed at YouTube. Feedback is appreciated!
I thought I would add a few of my personal thoughts on creating this screencast. I used a free trial of Camtasia Studio, a professional application for screencasting. I found the bulk of features to be user friendly, but I encountered substantial roadblocks when it would not allow me to record or re-record separate audio. The features for adding audio were simply grayed out and unavailable for selection. This required me to perform “live narration” while “recording” my screen for the screencast; this led to a less professional narration than I would have preferred (a few stops and stutters; uh, um, etc.). The other catch was the lack of a Flash option; I had to produce the file as an MP4. Fortunately, that was compatible with the PodPress plug-in I use for media files here on The Pinakes.
I liked the automatic zoom-and-pan features, though I had to edit them in a number of places as it zoomed in on the wrong part of the screen. More practice with the software would eliminate that step as I would learn how to manipulate the automatic system with my mouse moves. Overall, I found Camtasia to be a very simple program to use, my only quibbles probably down to deficiencies in my hardware.
WIPING THE SCREEN CLEAN
In Ancient Rome, it was fashionable for the sons of the wealthy to be educated by literate Greek slaves, some individually, others in small, privately run schools with at most a dozen students. The typical writing materials of the era were parchment (made from animal skins; vellum, from calves, was considered the highest quality) or papyrus, made from beaten reeds. However, both parchment and papyrus were too expensive for children’s education, so tutors used a clever alternative: a wax tablet and stylus.
The tutor or his students could use the stylus to draw markings in the semi-soft wax; afterwards, the text could be smoothed out and the tablet used again. With this tool, the tutor would teach the most important subjects to his students: Greek, Latin, and arithmetic. This idea never went away — from slate chalkboards to contemporary whiteboards, reusable writing surfaces have had a long lifetime.
Education today, of course, takes many forms, and extends far beyond the classroom. With distance learning enjoying ever-increasing acceptance, new tools had to be created to allow for classroom-quality teaching to be available in an asynchronous electronic environment. The computer, once owned and online, is a tool where lessons can be written and re-written, viewed and re-viewed, and updated all with minimal cost. One tool intended to fulfill that role is screencasting. A screencast is a video screen capture combined with narration and disseminated using RSS feed enclosures, much like a podcast or vlog.
One entertaining and well-known example of a screencast is the ‘heavy metal umlaut‘ screencast by Jon Udell that serves as a primer on wikipedia.
So how is the screencast being used by our bibliosphere? Meredith Farkas points out a number of examples:
- The UCLA Library’s “Road to Research” online research guide contains a number of screencasts, such as this side-by-side comparison of Google Scholar and the PsychINFO database.
- Princeton’s “UChannel” streams a mix of screencasts, filmed lectures and other materials, also available over RSS feeds and iTunes.
- The University of Maine has many of their online tutorials available as screencasts.
Other institutions use related technology for the same purpose. San Francisco State’s J. Paul Leonard Library prefers narrated slideshow style presentations, such as this one entitled Intro to College Level Research. I like this product since it avoids some of the herky-jerky, follow-the-mouse effects of Camtasia screencasts; it also has easy-to-use options for captions for users without speakers or headphones (this can be very important for library users!).
This is one of the chief perils of relying on screencast technology for user education; users at library computer terminals may not be able to listen to narrated presentations, or even if the library allows sound, they may hesitate to. We cannot assume that all users are accessing these types of resources from home computers; in fact, many users are at the library because they do not have home internet access. Therefore, we should provide multiple options, including captioned presentations and non-video (text and/or image-based) alternatives.
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PODCASTING TO THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE…
In this follow-up to Creating a Durable Voice, I investigate methods by which libraries are reaching out to the public with podcasting technology.
Run time- 3:47
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THE ART OF LISTENING
The Listener Remixed by Kim Dohrman
My first foray into being a podcast consumer started when I bought a larger, hipper iPod to replace my old dying model about two years ago. With so much space to fill, I looked to podcasts as a way to always have new content. Subscribing was easy enough; I was already using iTunes as my portal, so I searched the iTunes store for appealing podcasts. Established radio networks are a reliable source of quality material, so I went straight to NPR: Terry Gross’s Fresh Air and the occasional music series, All Songs Considered, appealed to me the most.
My problem turned out to be time. Fresh Air is a daily program, an hour apiece. For a while I picked and chose which broadcasts I wanted to listen to based on the guestlist, but after a while iTunes stopped downloading the new episodes automatically since I had failed to keep listening to the older ones. I managed a little better with All Songs Considered; it appears less often, not quite once a week, and is only 30-45 minutes. Eventually I fell too far behind it as well. Perhaps if I were a regular train commuter I’d be a better podcast consumer, but I’ve mostly been a bicycle commuter in my professional life and weaving through downtown traffic is trouble enough without the latest political debate on Fresh Air to distract me.
I’m more interested in the possibility of listening to music and news podcasts via my computer. I spend a dire number of hours per day in front of this monitor and podcasts of interviews or new music sound more compelling than my usual rehash of old music I’ve heard a thousand times. I’ve subscribed to two podcasts via RSS feeds on my browser from SFGate: Tim Goodman on television and Mick LaSalle on film. I’ve also subscribed to the San Francisco Public Library’s Word and Performance series. Via iTunes, I’ve re-subscribed to All Songs Considered and added Cool Tools for Library 2.0. Overall, I prefer the iTunes interface for subscribing to podcasts: iTunes is already my go-to program for listening to music, and it interfaces with my iPod and iPhone if I want to sync the podcast in multiple places.
Listening to Greg Schwartz’s presentation for the SirsiDynix Institute was fairly compelling and I was impressed by the range of library uses he described. Some seem obvious: storytime, for instance, or broadcasting planned presentations and lectures. I really liked his example of the Primary Sources Theater “performed” by an Academic Library on Long Island — that sounded inventive and interesting.
I’ve never been patient enough to listen, but with so many diverse offerings, perhaps it is time for me to develop my skills in the art of listening.
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CREATING A DURABLE VOICE
A quick glance at the legacy of oral communication and thoughts on podcasting, a technology for distributing sound via audio files to the general public.
Runtime- 4:56
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READ DELICIOUS
Looks tasty, does it not? Delicious, perhaps? Del.icio.us (and its newer, friendlier to the eye url, delicious.com) has become one of the poster children for “Web 2.0″ applications. Why is it so popular? What advantages does it offer? What makes it so tasty?
I would posit the single biggest reason for its popularity is its portability. Few heavy internet users — the omnivores of the ether — spend their whole time using one computer. Many have a computer at work, and a computer at home. Perhaps both a desktop and a laptop, or a Mac and a PC. For users with more than one computer, Delicious offers one simple, elegant solution to retaining bookmarks; instead of lodging them all in a browser or browser toolbar, contained to one machine, their bookmarks are automatically transferred to an online database and retrievable from any machine. It’s one of the key principles of “cloud computing“, and Delicious does it simply and intuitivly.
While I believe that is Delicious’ single most appealing aspect, it certainly isn’t the end of its usefulness. In fact, the system is designed to be much more: a human-powered search algorithm, encouraging its educated user-base to tag their favorite pages across the wide expanse of the internet frontier. By applying folksonomic tags to every page, the users provide the means to search terms for sites already approved of by discerning readers. It’s an end-around to Google’s computer driven matrix and can help bypass commercial junk in favor of genuine, interesting pages.
So naturally I searched for my own page to see what would come up. Specifically, the word pinakes. Now, I certainly own no copyright to the word; it is ancient in origin and naturally appealing to librarians, archivists and catalogers so I was not surprised by the range of pages returned in a Delicious search. Amongst its 46 appearances, it brought me to search portals, a model database for scientific artifacts (that one seemed particularly cool: I might tag it myself), a Spanish-language online education periodical, an art blog in a Cyrillic alphabet (which language I could not say, nor its relation to the pinakes), a wiki-manual for an Italian information database, and even two bookmarks pointing to this humble blog — and I’m only responsible for one of them. I have a reader! The user in question, who I do not know, thought to tag this website under “web”, “2.0″, and “library” — not bad.
The ability to funnel users, networks or tags into RSS feeds only gives Delicious even greater versatility. As it continues to expand its user base, it will be interesting to see to what degree social bookmarking replaces the shotgun approach of traditional search engines.
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