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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.
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.
A READING ROOM
While this blog will largely be devoted to technology, it is always worthwhile to look at the past: there is both beauty and wisdom in the old ideas of our great institutions.
One of my favorite aspects of historic libraries is the grand, classical reading room with its soaring ceilings and walls clad in books. Few modern libraries have a public space so monumental, and so wholly devoted to quiet scholarship. The reader is impressed by his or her surroundings; it elevates their condition. I took this picture in the reading room of the New York Public Library:
Locally, I recommend the Doe Library’s Reference Reading Room, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, for similar grandeur. Would you nominate any other grand spaces?
