LITA Blog

Ed Salazar, Web/Reference Librarian at Northcentral University in Prescott Arizona, covered some concerns which led to implementation of how they do it at NCU. Some of the reasons are few (3) librarians and a burgeoning student population, making face-to-face instruction a challenge.
Easy to understand guides, and quizzes to test and/or explain concepts, are helpful to students in their quest to find reliable informagtion. Some of the techniques used to build the guides are screen-captures, flowcharts, and other pathfinders.

The provision of these servcies over the web reduces in-person demand and better serves students by being available anytime the student wants them. To build these services, the library collaborates with the IT department for the backend, librarians collaborate on the quides and quizzes, and the feedback from faculty and students are used to enhance the services.

Quizzes and guides are built in a web-based environment, librarians can create or edit quiz questions and guides on-the-fly in a CMS type environment.

The library at NCU is more Open Source leaning than the IT department, OS is not supported by university IT. Still OS apps are used in the creation of these services.

For screen capture, CamStudio and Wink(Windows), Istanbul and Byzanz(Linux), and vnc2swf(all platforms) are used.
For Quizzes, PHP Web Quiz, SMS Studio Demo, WebQuiz, and Online Survey and Web Poll are used. (Links are my guesses, btw) Other software mentioned were: Camtasia, Captivate, Snapz Pro, and Qarbon Viewlet Builder. [We had a lively discussion after the presentation ended about various software that could be used for all this.]

With data created with the above tools, NCU rolled their own homegrown quizzes. Since these were housed on the IT departments (windows) servers, the code used was ASP and some JavaScript.

Tips to remember about screen captures, consider using smaller screen sizes (1024×768 or 800×600), ADA compliance is very important – make sure you check your material for this, keep it short & sweet – filesizes get big – fast, and the audio doesn’t have to be perfect the first time through – you can always edit later.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 4:22 pm and is filed under LITA Forum 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.