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:

  1. how to break a complex question into keyword terms,
  2. how to find scholarly articles, magazines, or newspapers about a topic in Academic Search Premier,
  3. 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.