Collaboration (again)

Central TAFE librarians have been busy since the start of semester teaching information literacy skills to many of the new students enrolled throughout the college. We have a good team and have developed (and share) some useful tools to make our jobs easier.

On the theme of collaboration (mentioned in my previous post) I came across an email that I sent myself last year relating to collaboration via wiki with librarians everywhere, as well as the video tutorials mentioned in the first paragraph.

Techtorials via LibrarianInBlack by Sarah Houghton-Jan on 11/29/07

Here's another technology tutorial website for your toolkit, either for staff or user training. We all need to know computer stuff, right? Right!

Techtorials offers video tutorials for three applications: Adobe Photoshop, Irfanview, and 7-Zip. It's not being updated frequently (last video was uploaded 7 months ago), but what is already there is quite useful--particularly the Photoshop tutorials. Take a look!

I think it would be lovely if libraries who have developed technology tutorials could contribute what they've made to this and other collaborative wiki-style tutorial sites. There are many, and sharing what we have is what it's all about. While I'm at it, I'll put in a plug for the Library Instruction Wiki, another place that libraries should be sharing any training materials created in-house (Word documents, Powerpoints, wikis, blogs, videos, screencasts, podcasts, anything).

We reinvent the wheel so much. We don't need to. We just need to convince administrators to let us post things we've created, for the betterment of libraries and users everywhere. Good goal, right? But you'd be surprised how often administrators say that those materials cannot be shared because they belong to the library/city/county/university/school and are the property of its funders/taxpayers, not the "everybody" of the Web. Oy, the politics make my head hurt.

(Techtorials was found many months ago on eContent (can you tell I'm wading through my backlog of "stuff to blog"?))

Thanks to Sarah for blogging about this and bringing another blog and that useful wiki to our attention.