Library Web Chic

Last week I finally reached the point where I had no choice but to create a screencast. Why no choice you ask? No choice because we’ve been bringing up our content management system slowly but surely and there aren’t enough people and time to provide face to face training that meets the needs of everyone in the library. Add to that the people forget what they learn in training, and I’ve been spending my time doing a whole lot of hand holding the six weeks. I don’t mind training people, it just is purely an issue of efficiency. One of my 50+ librarians, a plethora of other code to be written and systems to be implemented.

To deal with this, I dived headfirst into screencasting. I hoped that by making a screencast that demonstrated the basic tasks content owners need to perform in the content management system that people would have another resource for help besides me. First, I downloaded and installed CamStudio desktop recorder on the PC in my office. Then I hooked up a microphone and started experimenting using my scant script notes. After about two hours of starts, stops, phone call intereptions, and script revisions I came up with a product that I was quite pleased with for my first attempt. Initially, CamStudio creates an AVI file (yucky), but one of the reasons I chose to use it is that it has the ability to change AVIs to Flash. Supposedly the program can make either SWF (which I made) or FLV files that can be loaded and edited in Flash. The process of exporting to Flash took longer than I would have liked. However, the quality of the final product was higher than I expected. Within the Libraries it loaded fast and was the visuals were nice and crisp. I’m a bit concerned about how it would render on dial-up due to the file size. However, for this project it wasn’t a concern.

I still need to do some playing to figure out how to create screencasts on the Mac. I’ve got software installed to try but haven’t had the time yet. I’ll post about those efforts when I get them off the ground.