I haven’t been posting much, mostly due to having several things on my plate at one time. One thing that I did manage to get off my plate this week was our screencast that covers the Basics of Academic Search Premier. The screencast/tutorial teaches users the following:
- how to break a complex question into keyword terms,
- how to find scholarly articles, magazines, or newspapers about a topic in Academic Search Premier,
- and how to use the database to expand search strategies and maximize search results.
I probably put about 20 hours into the project, which resulted in a 15 minute screencast. It took me several tries to get the storyboard arranged how I wanted it, and I kept tweaking the examples that I used. I hope the result is something that our students (and others ) will use to understand basic searching in ASP.
The screencast was created with Captivate. The concluding movie was captured with iMovie and then imported into Flash. The screencast can be viewed here, but please note that it is not dialup friendly. Also, Captivate-generated Flash files do not play nicely with Flash 6, so you may need to update your Flash player for the screencast to work properly.
September 15, 2006 at 1:07 pm
And did you submit it to the ALAO Instruction Clearinghouse? (http://www.alaoweb.org/comsigs/iig/clearinghouse.html) Hmmm? 🙂
September 15, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Not yet, but I do appreciate you pointing that out to me, Wade.
September 27, 2006 at 10:21 am
Chad, that’s amazing. Could I use your idea for our library?
October 11, 2006 at 7:37 am
Chad – thanks for adding library voice to the academic blog portal. Are you open to the possibility of making the captivate file available to others. Your tutorial is well done and once put into captivate I think I could customize it for my library.
How are students responding? I would think it would be hard to get them to spend 15 minutes sitting through a tutorial – which is why it might be something to break up into short modules – say two minutes on picking search terms; two minutes on reviewing the document. What are you finding?
I’m going to point to your tutorial on ACRLog – just as a way of indicating how the blog portal allowed me to discover your blog and find something of interest.
To add to Wade’s suggestion you could also submit the tutorial to ACRL’s repository – PRIMO at http://www.ala.org/ala/acrlbucket/is/iscommittees/webpages/emergingtech/primo/index.htm
Thanks.
Steven
October 11, 2006 at 9:08 am
Steven,
Thanks for your comments. The tutorial is a tad lengthy, but it was originally designed to be used by classes. We have a number of classes who have used our static html online tutorial, and the ASP tutorial is the first in a series of modules that wil replace the old tutorials. It’s a little early to tell how students think of the tutorial, but I have received some really positive feedback from professors and instructors who are going to use the tutorial in class.
Also, as soon as time permits, I will post the Captivate source file for others to share. I appreciate you suggesting this. Our library benefits greatly from open source software, and this will be one way we can contribute back to the community. I’ll let you know when the source file is ready for download.
December 18, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Hello
As a fresh libraryvoice.com user i just want to say hi to everyone else who uses this board <:-)