Academic public service librarians are increasingly challenged to explain a complex array of online library research tools to our users.  As we struggle to find creative ways of engaging students in the process of research, we also understand that when our users approach the resources we provide online, they often do so without in-person instruction or the guidance of a librarian. How do we get students to think of our tools as part of their research discovery experience while providing instruction in a way that fits into their lives? As students become increasingly familiar with and involved in the production of online digital content, how do we engage them in learning about the process of research?

In the winter of 2008 grant funding was secured at the University of Washington Libraries to begin a project, Online, Interactive Video Content for Information Literacy and Discovery. This project entailed the creation of screencast tutorials and person-on-the-street videos that would serve as online information literacy tools for point-of-need instruction.  The Educational Outreach Services Librarian, along with a Graduate Student Assistant from the UW Information School, developed a series of quick, services-based, how-to tutorials that assist users in using and navigating online resources by demonstrating search techniques and online tools in a way that is immediate and easy to understand. These tutorials can be easily be replaced or modified, and appear to casually relay research tips and information, rather than instructing in a lengthy, prescriptive tone. Inspired by the YouTube conversational style that features “amateurs” as producers of digital content, we expect these tutorials and videos to speak to an increasingly visual, media-oriented student community.

Along with these tutorials, a plan was developed for recording “person on the street” videos that feature short, impromptu interviews with students, faculty and staff around the UW campuses and in off campus locations, on questions related to information, research techniques, information literacy and media literacy.  Going on the principle that students are increasingly interested in learning about the opinions of their peers, and that this is often the first kind of "filtering" that they do to determine the best way of finding information, these videos engage viewers by presenting real-life, unscripted conversations with individuals in the university community.  While these fun and informative videos may reference library services and tools, on the whole they seek to get viewers thinking about the connections between their information seeking behavior and that of others in their academic community, within or without the context of the library.

This poster describes two ongoing projects: the development of quick, 1.5 minute "how do I..." screencast tutorials created using Adobe Captivate, and a series of “person on the street” videos that feature short, impromptu interviews with those around the University on questions related to research techniques and information literacy.

Inspiration for Person-in-the-street project drawn from:

Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the Unviersity of Rochester. Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons. Chicago: ACRL. 2007.

Education in Exponential Times: How Technology-Enabled Change is Reshaping Higher Education. Webcast with Michael Rogers, Diana Oblinger and Joel Hartman. The New York Times Knowledge Network and the Society for College and University Planning.

Social Networking Technologies: A Poke for Campus Services. Kathleen Christoph, Lori Berquam and Joanne E. Berg. EDUCAUSE Annual Conference 2007.

Participatory Librarianship and Change Agents. David Lankes. Blended Librarian Webcast.

Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of findings from the Digital Youth Project. Researchers at University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley.2008.

Project Information Literacy (PIL) National Research Study based in the University of Washington's Information School

Yahoo! Answers in the Street

Process for drafting and recording Screencast Tutorials:

The screencast tutorials that exist on the UW Libraries How Do I... page were created using Adobe Captivate 3. Tutorials were selected based on topics for which existing textual information on the topic was outdated or insufficient. A loose script was written based on the topic (see sample script How do I search for Dissertations and Theses?) which included ideas for images and voice script, and a draft tutorial recorded in Adobe Captivate. Screencasts were recorded at 800x600. Audio, recorded using a Blue Snowball USB microphone, was recorded for each slide of the tutorial. Edits were made to keep the tutorial fast-paced and under 2 minutes in length. Text boxes, captions and highlight boxes were standardized to uniform shapes and colors for a consistent feel. Using Adobe Captivate 3, tutorials were publishable in Shockwave Flash files, but not in a movie file format (MOV, AVI, MP4, etc).

An additional challenge was the fact that Adobe Captivate 3 creates a series of Flash files, rather than one single file, which makes distributing tutorials via movie-sharing sites challenging. A "How Do I..." page was designed for the UW Libraries website to display these flash tutorials in one player. Closed Captioning was entered by hand, based on the edited tutorial script. Tutorials were then resized in Captivate to 500x375 to fit the dimensions of the video player. We are currently (3/09) experimenting with the trial version of Adobe Captivate 4, which allows for multiple output formats, including AVI. This would make sharing the tutorials via the UW Libraries YouTube and blip.tv page easier. We are also considering TechSmith's Camtasia 6. For displaying videos in a small You-Tube size window, Camtasia's pan-and-zoom feature makes reading small amounts of text on a screen much easier.