Booktrailers - Using and Creating Them

When librarians use, create, or teach others to create booktrailers... they are marketing books, authors, and reading. This new Librarian-promoted (and student-promoted) trend is a good thing. It is NOT something librarians and other educators are taught in college or grad school. It is a win-win-win strategy. Librarians need to develop a tag line such as "powered by the XYZ library". Next step: Figure out how to measure results.

The June 2010 annual American Library Association conference included a panel program organized by the YALSA (Young Adult Library Services) Teens and Technology Interest Group on creating booktrailers. Booktrailers are promotional music videos similar to movie trailers. "ALA10: Lights! Camera! Booktrailers!" included an author, a book publisher, school and public librarians who shared how they create or teach booktrailers.

Librarians interest young people in reading books by teaching them how to create booktrailers. After all, you can't create a video about a book if you haven't read it! Vallencia District Librarian Joy Millam's "Booktalks and More" wiki includes a how-to on creating book trailers and a growing list of booktrailer student-created examples.

Georgia Teacher Librarian and blogger (The Unquiet Librarian) Buffy Hamilton spoke about how librarians can use existing booktrailers to teach and engage students.

GoAnimate

Teacher Librarian Marie Slim has been using a bucket full of different attention-getting web 2.0 tools to promote the California School Library Association conference in Ontario this November. See Marie's GoAnimate promo:

GoAnimate.com: CSLA Early Bird Sign-Ups by Oct. 30th by sraslim


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Banned Books Music Video - Dfilm

Devolver MovieMaker (formerly DFilm) was easy and fun to use. I made a quick mini-movie on "Banned Books". Check it out and encourage them to add a book-themed (library) backdrop option! Lots of potential for advocacy, not just a fun toy. Fun is a powerful way to make a point.

Flip video cameras, Voice Presentation Systems, & Hand-held Smart Boards

· Flip video cameras - Teachers and Teacher-Librarians give them to students to take short videos for projects. Very popular in GA. "Flip" refers to the memory stick drive that you remove to transfer video footage to your computer. This could be useful for libraries wanting to promote or report on future and past library events, create simple “how to” or “why to” use an online database and add to library website, wiki, or blog.

· Voice presentation systems with wireless mic for wearing like a necklace so all students including those in the back of the room could hear with same quality and volume. Product was from was LightSPEED Technologies.

· Hand-held substitute for a Smart Board, used with a projector. Size of an etch-a-sketch but with all the software and network connections of a Smart Board. (wireless). Smart Boards are popular with educators, but the new hand-held versions might be of interest to public libraries. Good for meeting rooms. Network application.

Build Your Own Horizon Report - Rachel Smith

"Mashup the Library" was the theme of the annual CARL North IT Summer Workshop, which was held on June 25, 2008 in the new library on the Santa Clara University campus.

This post includes my notes from Keynote Speaker Rachel Smith, Vice President of New Media Consortium. Photo is of CARL North IT co-President Sheila Cunningham and Rachel Smith. Rachel set the stage for her presentation on new technology trends when she used a scrolling presentation by Vuvox collage rather than a traditional PowerPoint Presentation to walk the audience through her overview of the 5th annual Horizon Report. This is the time of year when NMC puts out a “call to scholarship” around topics in the Horizon Report. The technology forecast is written for higher education in general, not a specific group within academia. NOTE: August is an excellent time for academic librarians to contribute to the effort. In fact, in addition to regularly contributing to it, academic libraries should make it a point to acquire a copy of the report each year. It would be a good report for the library to promote to its faculty and add a cover commentary on how the library is using or would use new technology.

The Horizon report has three (3) horizons: 1-2 years, 3-4 years, and 5+ years. Each section focuses on two technologies. The Report represents an effort to capitalize on research done by a few people and to distribute the information to many. It is not predictive. It is a forecast.

This year, there is also a section on metatrends – trends that appeared in multiple years of the Horizon Report. An example of this is Gaming. Three years ago, Gaming was featured in the 5th year. Then, Second Life and World of Warcraft became big so Gaming became a topic called Virtual Worlds. Gaming became big but in an unanticipated way.

Here's how the technologies are selected. The Horizon Report has a 40-member International Advisory Board representing about eight countries. There are no face-to-face meetings, just a wiki. Each year, members start with all possible technologies (about 100) and then each member votes for their top 10 technologies and assigns each a horizon (1, 2, or 3). This reduces the list to 12 topics, and then each is written up. The write-up includes how the technology is or would be used in higher education. There are four topics per horizon. Next, members of EduCause and NMC are invited to give examples. One example Rachel cited was from a South Carolina private university, Abilene Christian University, which gave each student a choice of an iPhone or iPod Touch at the beginning of the Fall semester. All class content and other content were on these mobile devices. At ACU, faculty wrote a horizon report version for their own university.

What was forecast in the 2008 Horizon Report?
YR 1-2:
· Grassroots video (video clips like YouTube, which are easy to capture, edit, and share.)
· Collaboration web (i.e., NING or pageflakes)

YR 3-4:
· Mobile Broadband (like iPhone and iPod Touch). Big shift in downloading via wireless LANS. Broadband and mobile are almost everywhere. See ACU vision film. Other examples are PhoneGuide in museums and video direct to the web.
· Data Mashups – see TED video with Hans Rosling, where he debunks 3rd world myths about poverty by “mashing” statistics – combining two or more data bases to make visual representations of the information. See also annual video mashup contest at the University of Pennsylvania. It is very inventive and creative. Songs or broadcasts are mashed up with videos. See “Info Commons @ U of Penn” music video, “Weigle Info Commons”.

YR 5+:
· Collective intelligence: implicit and explicit. Amazon book recommendations is an example of an implicit collective intelligence. Wikipedia, reCaptcha, and Flickr the Commons (public photo collection) are examples of explicit collective intelligence. So is museum tagging – see http://www.steve.museums/.
· Social Operating Systems: the next generation of social networking. An example cited is xobni which is useful for MS Outlook.

Build your own Horizon! There are a number of regional Horizon Reports planned, such as one from Australia. One group wants to do one specifically for K-12. NOTE: Librarians should contribute to it up front each year, add examples, and also promote and discuss it on campus. The next Horizon Report will be released in January 2009 at the ELI Conference (EDUCAUSE) in Philadelphia, PA.

U-VERSE @ home

I've had AT&T U-Verse at work for months, ever since I moved my office into the AT&T Executive Briefing Center. Most mornings, I turn on the flat screen monitor and hunt for new HDTV channels that are on at 7am. My favorite channel so far is National Parks. Love it!

Now, U-Verse is available in my neighborhood so we ordered it for the home. All was "magically" installed when I was out of town. Here is an animoto of the installation. [note: the free animoto is not as good as it used to be because if you want "DVD quality" you need to pay for it. The digital photos are really very good -- the animoto video takes them down in quality!]

AT&T U-Verse has an agreement with FLICKR, so I can show my FLICKR photos on any of my Televisions. I keep discovering new features. I also have wireless Internet throughout my house, so the family no longer has to compete for the DSL line. :)

If you have never heard of this great IP-based video/TV service, see the U-Verse demo and see if the service is available in your neigborhood. It is being pushed out little by little, and it took me by surprise by how soon it was available on my street. Enjoy.

Week 9: LibraryThing and YouTube (#19, 20 Thing)

Week 9 is the final week of SJLibrary 2.0 and the first exercise asks us to look at LibraryThing, something I did back in Week 6 when the focus was on tagging. We were invited to look at MoBuzzTV.com for a story on LibraryThing, but I couldn't find the story even when searching their archives. MoBuzzTV has lots of interesting and short technology stories.

Another assignment (#20) is to check out YouTube and look for other similar sites. Humm.. this also seems like a repeat for me from Week 6. Two of my favorite "library themed" YouTube videos are Library Dominos and Ray of Light. Library Dominos is short, mostly silent, yet sweet. ray of Light has great music and is "a day in the life of a library" - a real treat and tribute to all who work at the St. Joseph's County Library.