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.

Video tools

Central TAFE's "23 Things" team has had a lot of fun playing around with various online video tools, mostly visible on YouTube. In particular there have been some hilarious mashups using JibJab. It's fortunate that our colleagues (and bosses) have a sense of humour.

To find videos why not try the Google Video Search Engine? This article from Research Buzz tells us more about it:

** Fun With Google Video
<http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/2007/09/17/fun-with-google-video/>

As you probably know, the Google Video Search Engine (http://video.google.com/) now encompasses other video sites, like YouTube. But if you don't want to search anything but Google Video, you can go to the advanced search page and specify that you want video only from Google.com, or you can use site:google.com from the home page.

That's how I discovered that site:google.com works as a standalone search. That's also how I discovered that Google Video has something over 4.8 million videos (just over 4.9 million if you turn off filtering). But if you start sorting the results by anything but relevance, the result count drops to about 333. So I couldn't get a handle on what the highest-rated video was or how many videos have been rated lately.

If you use inurl:video.google.com at Google, you'll see that the main search engine gives a result count of about 1.5 million pages.