The Distant Librarian

Lifehacker's best screencasting and screen capture apps

Over the past several weeks, Lifehacker has listed what they believe to be the best screencasting and screen capture tools for both Windows and Mac. In each post they cover the tool's Features, Where it excels, Where it falls short, and The Competition. Here they are:

• Best Screen capture tool for Windows (I had never heard of the winner, PicPick)
• Best Screen capture tool for Mac OSX (I love Skitch, but wish it had just a few more presets and callouts) For some strange reason the Skitch website says the iOS version is "coming soon", but you can (and should) grab it for the iPad already.
• Best Screencast tool for Windows (No surprise there - remember your educational pricing!)
• Best Screencast tool for Mac OSX (also a solid win, though I was surprised Camtasia:Mac didn't even show up under the alternatives...)

Canadian Learning Commons Conference - registration now open

Looking for an excuse to come check out our awesome new library building? Why not register for the 6^th Canadian Learning Commons Conference, to be held here at the University of Calgary, May 7-9, 2012. The theme of the conference is New Media, New Fluencies and Life Skills Development: Preparing Learners for the 21st Century, and you'll find the list of sessions here. Oh, and just 'cause it says "Canadian" in the title doesn't mean you guys south of the border can't come - Calgary should be pretty nice in early May (but no promises).

The importance of sweater vests and screencasting

Over at Library Voice, Chad Boeninger pops out of hibernation with an excellent post titled How I make instructional library web videos and screencasts and how you can too. In this post Chad distills his six years of experience with screencasting by answering the following questions:

1. Why Web Video?
   
2. What type of content?
3. How much time does it take?
4. How much time is saved?
5. How long should my videos be?
6. Script or no script?
7. Which software for screencasting?
8. How do I record my voice?
9. Where do you record your videos?
10. Which resolution?
11. Why and How do you add the video of yourself in the videos?
12. To edit or not?
13. How do I know when my video is done?
14. Where should I upload?
15. But you don’t use just use YouTube, do you?
16. How do I promote my videos?
17. What else should I know?

Yes, it's a long post :-)

Tips for making mobile-friendly screencasts

Over at The Screening Room, the blog to support the Mac-only screencasting product, ScreenFlow, you'll find a recent post with some guidelines for creating screencasts optimized for the iPhone and iPad. Note though that down in the comments you'll find some corrected information, so you should probably go with those figures.

While this post talks about ScreenFlow and iOS devices, the information obviously can be applied to other tools and other devices.

ebrary launches an iOS app

Well I was gonna give a complete review, but got called away for the afternoon, but you should should go check out the new ebrary iOS app (links to the Cdn iTunes store, so YMMV). I can tell you that it works pretty well, though is a little light on the feature set. You'll need an Adobe Digital Editions account, and will need to have an existing ebrary account set up from the full platform website. Here's ebrary's brief introduction to the app.

I'll tell you what though, it's sure a lot easier than the initial download option :-)

Mentoring a New Distance Education Librarian

A newish book popped up for me on an ego alert, and I learned that Mentoring in Librarianship: Essays on Working with Adults and Students to Further the Profession contains a chapter specifically on Mentoring a New Distance Education Librarian (it's chapter 27, written by Annie Knight). It's also available on Amazon, where you can search inside the book to decide if it's right for you.

2011- my year in reading

I started the first couple of weeks of 2011 on vacation, and was reading books on my iPhone at the time. I thought it'd be interesting to track how many books I read in 2011, something I'd never done before. I switched to reading on an iPad 2 when I got one in April, and did all my ereading either in the Kobo app, or the Overdrive app when borrowing books from Calgary Public Library. As I mentioned, I don't have numbers from any earlier years, but my strong sense is that I read more books this past year than any other in my adult life, in large part because of the ease of grabbing another title to read RIGHT NOW from an ebookstore, or CPL. Hope you find something interesting in here too. I'm not going to give you the actual titles read, most of which were some variant on SciFi or fantasy :-)

2011 by the numbers

• Total number of books read: 33
• Average number of books read per month: 2.75
• Total number of pages: 17,738
• Average number of pages per month: 1,478

 http://db.tt/aBJl8agV

Incidentally, I'm composing this on the iPad with charts pasted in from the Numbers app. I'm not at all sure the images will actually go through, but we'll see in a moment...

Nope, they didn't, so here's take 2.

OverDrive Posts Public Comment Apparently in Response to Librarian in Black Post

A quick followup to my post earlier this month noting Sarah Houghton-Jan's (LiB) rant about Overdrive's different catalogues. TeleRead point out that OverDrive has in fact clarified their position, but without making any mention of Sarah's post, which is likely the cause of theirs. It'd be great to hear a debate between these two parties :-)