The Distant Librarian

Not quite ready for prime time

A while ago I compared the Qarbon ViewletBuilder to Wink. A colleague and I just finished putting together a presentation we'll be delivering virtually at a local conference - Best Practices in eLearning. The idea is that we're going to deliver this Powerpoint w/o actually standing there to deliver it. Many of the other presenters have just uploaded papers, and a lot have uploaded Powerpoint converted to HTML, but we wanted to do something a little more flashy.

A couple of months ago I had seen a demo of Macromedia Breeze, which converts Powerpoint to Flash, including narration. That's what we were going to use to deliver this presentation, but our Learning Commons wasn't able to get a license secured in time for the presentation submission deadline (today). So I went back to the well and took a look at the Qarbon ViewletPresenter, which does pretty much the same thing.

Downloaded a demo and saw immediately that it wasn't as polished as I had come to appreciate with the other Qarbon products. But it worked. Mostly. Sorta. We ended up buying a copy ($99US - not too bad) because we knew we weren't going to have Breeze available. Spent lots of time recording the narration over our Powerpoint and did the conversion to Flash. ViewletPresenter didn't like some of our slide templates, and wouldn't render them completely on the web, and would also neglect to display some screenshots we had embedded. Audio worked great. Technical support at Qarbon was spectacular (as they always have been in my experience) and worked with me to troubleshoot. They ended up allowing me to download their next beta release of the product, and after I changed the slide templates to something slightly less complex we got it all to work. But only in Internet Explorer. Not in Mozilla :-( I'm still waiting to hear back from Qarbon to see if this is a known bug or something their working on or what. I'll be happy to share the presentation at the end of August once the conference is done.

Your mileage might vary. If you've got a short presentation you want to convert it might work perfectly the first time. Not sure what to say about the IE glitch - I hope they get that worked out in the next release. As it is, you can still download a demo version of the software and run it through its paces - your end result will have a big watermark on it, but you should be able to tell if it works otherwise. I suspect $99 is much cheaper than Breeze.

So things to do in the not-to-distant future: Compare ViewletPresenter with Breeze once our campus gets a license. Compare ViewletPresenter with Microsoft Producer, which does a similar conversion thing allowing both audio and video to stream along with your PowerPoint online. This might've worked well for us but I only learned about it yesterday, and I'll bet it also doesn't play nicely with Mozilla. Oh, there's an even slightly cheaper version of ViewletPresenter available at http://netron.imediasoft.net/ - it seems that Qarbon is licensing the product from Netron. but I have no experience with Netron tech support, nor do I know if they're working to upgrade their product. Out of the box right now they appear to be identical though.

Directions and Files For Integrating TILT Into Blackboard 6.0

An eBuddy of mine, Gary Roberts at Alfred University, has just posted some very comprehensive step-by-step instructions for importing TILT into BlackBoard.  I haven't followed the instructions yet, but Gary's been playing with TILT and BlackBoard for at least a year now, so I'm thinking he's got it down pretty good by now.  Thanks Gary!

The Library I.T. Blog :: Directions and Files For Integrating TILT Into Blackboard 6.0

Call for Papers

Academic Exchange Quarterly has a call for papers for a theme issue on Altenative Library Instruction - a shoe-in for us distance folk!

Focus: The goal of this issue will be to provide examples of alternative library instruction created by librarians or faculty members in all settings, K-12, public, academic, special, etc., that can be implemented by others. Alternative library instruction can be, but is not limited to: -- Curriculum integrated instruction -- Virtual instruction -- Audio/video tours -- Interactive instruction -- Active learning experiences -- Game oriented instruction

Best of all, the submission deadline isn't until February 2005.

Free Online Books

An entry from Open Access News discusses free online books available from the U of California Press and National Academy Press. I knew about the latter, but not the former. Didn't see much to recommend to my particular group of distance students, but you might find something relevant for yours. Apparently UC Press offers MARC records and PURLs as well. Good to know.

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)

Here's a list of all the available U of C Press books by subject: http://texts.cdlib.org/ucpress/subjects_public.html

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States

Wow, talk about convoluted! This was mentioned in ResearchBuzz, and I pass it on here for anyone who's maybe doing digitization projects for their distance students...

Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States

Library Instruction.Com - Resources for Library Instruction.

Just found this website, courtesy of a mention on the Information Literacy Weblog. Have only given it a cursory glance, but it's definately one to bookmark.

Library Instruction.Com - Resources for Library Instruction.

Here's an interesting "lesson plan" called Teaching Internet Library Instruction Sessions in the Electronic Classroom that might be particularly relevant for distance educators, considering our primary clientele.

Two Conference Presentations

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Alberta Distance Education and Training Association's (ADETA) annual conference, held here in Calgary. There were two library-related presentations at the conference, and I got something from both of them.

The first was presented by a student (and not a library student!) who had been involved in a research project with librarians at the University of Alberta. Jamal Mansour presented Teaching Information Literacy Over the Web - From Developing the Development Team to Instructing the Instructors (PDF), which discussed a modular IL program developed for large classes of UG Psychology students at the U of A. It was developed as a result of a survey in which most students ranked themselves pretty low in several information literacy areas, and the librarians wanted to tailor some online instruction to meet these perceived deficiencies. They used Macromedia Director to create five tutorials, which are available here. Nice work!

Several librarians from Lethbridge Community College and the University of Lethbridge presented The Magic of NESA Information Literacy through WebCT (PPT). NESA has something to do with their nursing program, and this was a description of how librarians at these two institutions were collaborating to offer IL to nursing students moving from one institution to another. What really hooked me though, is that LCC is using Elluminate vClass as a virtual reference tool, and I didn't realize that could be done! Basically they've got a link on their library home page (though it's not there now, maybe down for the long weekend?) that logs the user into vClass and bingo, you're off on a chat session that also allows co-browsing and full duplex voice communication via the web. I've used vClass to deliver instruction before, and to realize that it can be used for reference is exciting to me. I'm going to try to set it up at my institution to offer reference to students enrolled in the one program that supports this platform. Anyone else out there using vClass for virtual reference?

Most of the other presentations from the two-day conference are also online, either as papers or powerpoints (http://www.adeta.org/interface2004/interface2004.htm). Have a look, maybe there's something else of interest there for you.

Linking course web sites to library collections and services

Just finished reading the following article and have a couple of thoughts. The link should work if you have Science Direct on your campus. Supposed to also be available from EBSCO, but they appear to be two issues behind on this title...

Oya Y. Rieger, Angela K. Horne and Ira Revels, Linking course web sites to library collections and services, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 30, Issue 3, May 2004, Pages 205-211.

It occurs to me maybe I should be abstracting for Sandy on these things, but I don't want to get all formal with my abstracts - just want to jot down a few notes as I go.

I was hoping to read about how Cornell has a wonderful way of inserting persistent URLs into BlackBoard (U of C is a BlackBoard shop), but that's not what this article's about. As a result of a faculty survey librarians at Cornell did come up with nine recommendations geared towards helping the library become more integral within BlackBoard. Good solid stuff if you're new to this area.

What you might also peek at are the Canned Search Guides Cornell has put together. If you run the Voyager system you might be able to use this extensive information to your advantage. Maybe it's common knowledge (we don't use Voyager), but I'm thinking not based on how complex some of the options are.

The other site they mention is Northumbria University's Guidelines for integrating electronic library resources and Blackboard. Again no real specific examples of how to do it, but lots of good stuff to consider, such as licensing issues, file sizes, differences for on and off campus users, etc. If you're putting together a guide of this sort for faculty, or for your library, this would be a good site to consult.