The Distant Librarian

Inserting Flash into PPT

This morning I was helping a colleague learn Macromedia Breeze (convert PPT to Flash), and he wondered about the ability to include a brief (30 seconds) screencast within the presentation.  Breeze can handle animation, so I thought it could probably handle a movie too.  And it can.  But it's not very easy :-(

He used CaptureWiz Pro to record a screencast and save it as an AVI file (the only option).   It's very simple to insert an AVI as a movie clip into PPT, but it turns out that once converted to a Breeze presentation that movie only displays as a static screenshot.  (Incidentally I was surpised to learn that SnagIt, despite its shared family with Camtasia Studio, also only saves screencasts as AVI, so you won't be able to save the next step by using this tool).

So we surmised that since Breeze is a Macromedia product, it would probably do just fine if we could insert a Flash file into PPT.  I used Camtasia Studio to convert the AVI to SWF - piece of cake.  The fun part comes when you try to insert that SWF file into PPT.  You can't just insert it as you do a picture or audio clip (or even an AVI file).  Here are the gory details from the Macromedia website.  What a pain!

I only went so far as to prove to myself that it can be done - obviously there's still some tweaking that needs to be done as evidenced by the artifacts that show up on the finished product.  The screencast slide blows by pretty quickly because I didn't add any audio to it; again this was just a proof of concept.

I'm not sure if there are any other ways to get an actual animation into a Breeze presentation, but if anyone has any ideas, please pass them on!

College & Research Libraries online

As pointed out by David (and others), College & Research Libraries is now freely available online six months after the original publication date.  They're back to 1997 now, which is further back than I get through Wilson Education Full Text (mid 1998).  Some other nice tidbits from the press release:

"ACRL supports open access to scholarship as a principle for reform in the system of scholarly communication. In addition to this new access to College & Research Libraries, ACRL encourages author self-archiving of its published articles in both institutional and disciplinary repositories."

ACRL/DLS Haworth Press Distance Learning Librarian Conference Sponsorship Award

FYI:  This conference sponsorship award honors any individual ACRL member working in the field of, or contributing to the success of distance learning librarianship or related library service in higher education. -- $1200 to help defray the costs of travel to and participation in the ALA Annual Meeting and a citation plaque sponsored by Haworth Press.  Link: ALA | DLS Award.

ProQuest Dissertations and Theses RSS Feed

OK idea for ProQuest to offer an RSS feed for dissertations and theses in seven subject areas, but my campus runs everyone (even on-campus users) through EZProxy before accessing this database, so even on campus when I click a link in the resulting feed I can't get to the actual content.  I need a way to include my EZProxy prefix in this feed for it to be useful to me, and of course my distance students would find the same thing.  I also need to be able to get feeds for searches I have saved myself, not just in broad subject areas.  A good start though!

Location of Librarian Bloggers

Via Steven at Library Stuff, a link to librarian bloggers on the Frapr mapping service (indicate your location on a Google Map).  Man, I had forgotton how far south Chicago is! ;-)

Off-Campus Library Services Conference Workshops

There are three workshops being held in conjunction with the Off Campus Library Services Conference next year.  They'll be held concurrently with other sessions.  What I like about this listing page is that in addition to descriptions, it lists assumptions, objectives and outcomes for each workshop.  The workshop titles are: Using Web Site Usability Testing To Support Distance Learning Students, Firewalls, Ad-blockers, Web Accelerators, etc.: Helping Remote Users of Electronic Resources Overcome Barriers to Access, and Copyright in the Online Course Environment

Innovate and Motivate: Next Generation Libraries - ALA | ACRL/CNI/EDUCAUSE Joint Virtual Conference

Would seem to be plenty of room for Distance Librarians at this conference: ALA | ACRL/CNI/EDUCAUSE Joint Virtual Conference - Innovate and Motivate: Next Generation Libraries.

Submissions will be accepted through January 6, 2006

Where Learners Go - Library Journal

Good solid article from a good solid source (Joan K. Lippincott, Ph.D., is Associate Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information) This article will be a good one to pull out if you need to convince your administrators of the importance of whatever newfangled thing it is you're trying to do right now...  Link: Library Journal - Where Learners Go.

Quote for you:  "It is crucial that librarians who are committed to maintaining and expanding their role and the role of libraries in the new learning process via the Internet ensure that their web presence engages those new learners."

Busy Day for Digital Books: News from Amazon and Google

Search Engine Watch reports that Amazon will begin allowing customers to purchase individual pages from certain books: Busy Day for Digital Books: News from Amazon and Google.  Another press release had a great quote showing to whom this is going to be of interest (hint - it's our students):

"For scholars and people who are only interested in specific information, that is probably is a market in the near- to mid-term," she said. "For other people, it's going to be take a while longer. ... Downloading a chapter of a mystery novel doesn't cut it."

Allan Carrington on the scene with a group from Penn State talking about Instructional Design Librarians | connect.educause.edu

Great short podcast (about 12 minutes) from Educause 2005 in which Allan Carrington is on the scene with a group from Penn State talking about Instructional Design Librarians.  I think being an Instructional Design Librarian would be really neat.  The most interesting thing I got from this was that when developing this position, apparently it used to be just a straight IT position, but they added the librarian bit because librarians at Penn State are faculty, and they figured librarians would be more well-received by the teaching faculty.  Don't always personally find that to be true, but it's neat to hear it put that way. 

Instant Messaging: IM Online! RU? - EDUCAUSE REVIEW | November/December 2005, Volume 40, Number 6

Coming back from Internet Librarian I have finally swallowed the red IM pill and will be offering this service for my distance students.  That sounds so nice of me ;-)  I'm not "offering it", I'm finally starting to pay attention to the statistics and will likely join my students in this space, coming up from the rear of the pack and learning as I go.  Contact information is here, and will likely also show up in my email sig.

I'm not sure if this will take off considering the demographics of distance students suggest they're an older lot, but I did recently get some survey results back that indicated about 13 of 24 respondants use IM (can't find the results right now - must! clean! office!) so I might just be surprised.

For those of you who've been waiting for a slightly more academic look at the use of IM in higher ed, here you go: EDUCAUSE REVIEW | November/December 2005, Volume 40, Number 6. 

From the conclusion of that article: 

With IM playing such a large role in the communication, interactivity, and socialization skills of today’s younger generation, higher education leaders and faculty must seriously consider its application and inclusion within students’ learning activities. The use of such collaborative communications tools within courses and course activities creates a more engaging learning environment for students, most of whom have already adopted the readily available IM tool and are using it prolifically.

Pretty much sounds like what Aaron and Sherri and Jenny have been saying for so long...  (Ha!  Take that Jenny - I'll bet your server crashes now that I've linked to you!  ;-)

Journal Cost-Effectiveness Search

Hmm, here's an interesting tool for those of you with any collection development responsibilities... Journal Cost-Effectiveness Search.

Is this thing on???

I've had several people ask what I used to record the sessions at IL2005 - it was an iRiver IFP 790 with an external microphone attached - an Apex 162 which I picked up at a local music store for about $20.  I probably captured the audio at too high a bitrate, and even when compressing with Audacity, which I used to de-amplify the clapping bits and amplify the rest, I probably didn't compress the filesize enough, which is why they're all such large files.  I'll learn :-)

A little personal history - I picked up the IFP because I wanted something that I could use with an external mic that I have hanging in the backseat of my car (it's the Apex again) so I can record the hilarious things my son says on the way home from daycare.  I just turn it on and we talk, and every couple of days there's a real gem captured.   For the longest time I had been using a minidisc recorder to do this same thing - it records just beautifully, but, and IMHO this is the reason MD is about to die, the ony way you can get audio off the thing is in real time analogue - you've got to plug in an audio cable from the MD and run it to a computer, and it takes one hour to move an hour of audio from the MD to the computer.  But with the IFP it tranfers via USB and automatically compresses to mp3, so an hour of audio takes about 2-3 minutes to transfer, if that!

So, after all that, guess what the official recording company was using to record the sessions at IL2005?  You got it - minidisc recorders!  The quality will be great, especially because they were patched in to the sound system instead of using mics, but wow, what labor they'll have to employ to get the audio off, unless they have some sort of high-speed dubber.  I showed them my IFP and they seemed pretty interested...  So yeah, all the sessions were taped at IL2005 and they're going to sell a CD, but I think you had to put in your order during the conference, which doesn't help those who couldn't make it much.  I may be wrong, and will let you know if I learn that the CD is for sale online - it'd be a good one to have.

Library equivalent of Slashdot?

Ok, so it's not quite as dramatic as the /. effect, which regularly brings down servers when millions of visitors rush off to check the mentioned site, but late on Monday night, Jenny Levine, the Shifted Librarian, mentioned my site.  I happened to get my hit stats mailed to me this AM and thought it was pretty interesting to see the result; my stats for Tuesday are more than double any other day of the past seven...  :-) 

Leigh thinks Librarians Rock

Leigh came on my radar several months ago when I was playing around with translation services; he's involved in online education.  Gotta love it when someone posts with a title of  Librarians Rock!  I don't think I have any librarian feeds from Australia, so I've added his recommended feed.