Those of us working public service desks in our college libraries have certainly noticed that our user base is becoming increasingly more savvy with information technologies. Our users are more comfortable interacting with technology, and that shows through increased use, and satisfaction with, digital reference services.

This increase in the level of sophistication of our users provides us with an opportunity to provide a new service to our users: digital instruction. We can combine our proficient user base with innovative new tools to reach a larger audience with workshops, bibliographic instruction, and library orientations. Taking cues from the gains made in distance education, we can provide instruction to our users on their own schedule.

Digital Instruction has more overhead during the creation process, but requires almost no staff time to deliver once completed. A well-designed presentation can add tremendous value to the service we provide to our users, and the upkeep on such presentations is minimal; once a particular session is created, it can function until the topic changes. A digital tour of the library, for instance, can serve until major changes are made to the library or its collections. Lastly, delivering the content digitally still allows for keeping metrics and receiving feedback through server logs and contact forms.

I'd like to stress that I don't think that providing digital instruction is a replacement for in person instruction any more than digital reference is a replacement for regular reference services. It gives us another way to reach our users and to increase the level of service we can provide to them.

With that in mind, I'd like to introduce a few tools that could be used to provide digital instruction that will reach a maximum number of library users with differing skill sets.

Captivate from Macromedia
Captivate is an application for creating online tutorials. One of its primary functions is to capture what happens on a computer screen, and allow that video to be synched up with audio that you record. This tool is excellent for creating demonstrations of how to use online tools, giving the user a direct visual display of where to find links or objects on screen, and how to navigate applications. I work at the information desk at Allen Library, and I often take phone calls from users who have difficulty accessing our databases from off-campus using the proxy server. A small, simple video of the process would be a valuable visual aid for teaching such a skill to our users. Captivate creates movies in Macromedia Flash format, which has a tremendous installed base (NPD 2005).

This technique is called "Screencasting," and the Wikipedia entry on the subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast) has a number of links to other kinds of software that can create this kind of content.

Producer from Microsoft
Microsoft Producer 2003 combines Windows Media (both video and audio) with Power-Point presentations. It allows you to synch up your video or audio with PowerPoint Slides, and also allows you to create the audio or video at different sizes for different types of internet connections. It requires the user to have Windows Media Player 9 (which is standard with all versions of Windows XP) and either Netscape or Internet Explorer. It embeds the presentation on a web page. The presentations allow the user to pause and fast forward, and to skip ahead to other slides, and the audio will automatically re-synch. It has a low learning curve, and provides helpful wizards for developing presentations once the component parts (either audio or video and PowerPoint slides) are assembled.

The University of Washington Information School uses Producer in its distance learning mode, both for presentations by students as well as by the instructors for lectures. It is free for license holders of PowerPoint 2003 or PowerPoint 2002.

Podcasting & Digital Audio
Podcasting is the common name given to digital audio files delivered via the RSS 2.0 specification. Its strength lies in that it allows users to subscribe to that RSS feed and have their RSS application automatically download new audio content when it is updated. There is a slight technological challenge involved in setting up the RSS feed (which requires an elementary knowledge of XML), but there are many examples available online. For instruction purposes, a "Library Tip of the Week" or a "Ask a Librarian" podcast might be a wonderful way to reach out to our users and to inform them of the services the library provides.

While the strength of podcasting is in the syndicated deliverable, another use of digital audio would be for creating self-guided audio tours. A carefully designed tour would allow our users to download an audio file, load it on to their personal audio player (such as an iPod) and get a walking library tour on their own schedule.

The technology used for podcasting and creating digital audio are available for free, but there are commercial products available. A great resource to look when creating your own podcasts would be to look at the del.icio.us tags "podcast" and "howto," found at http://del.icio.us/tag/podcast+howto.

Digital Video
The problem with providing actual video online has been a problem of what format to provide those files in. While Windows Media (WMV) and Quicktime (MOV) can be found on nearly every computer made in the past two years (around 85% and 65% respectively) (NPD 2005), they do present a usability challenge for those on slow internet connections. Streaming servers of Windows Media and Quicktime can be difficult to set up and use. Also, in order to reach our full audience, digital video should be provided in both formats. A new format, Flash Video, also known as FLV, is becoming more prevalent due to video aggregation websites such as Google Video (http://video.google.com) and YouTube (http://www.youtube.com). Flash Video is strong because of its seamless interface and ease of embedding such video in context with webpages, and all modern web browsers have Macromedia Flash software pre-installed. FLV also works across platform, even reaching Linux and Macintosh users. Flash video does not have the fidelity of other video formats, but its wide installed user base and ease of use make up for that low fidelity.

Links
How to Create Your Own Podcast: http://radio.about.com/od/podcastin1/a/aa030805a.htm
ffmpeg Home Page: http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php
Video and Audio Streaming with Flash and Open Source Tools: http://klaus.geekserver.net/flash/streaming.html
Yahoo! Podcasts: http://podcasts.yahoo.com/publish
Screencast - Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast
Microsoft Producer: http://www.microsoft.com/office/powerpoint/producer/prodinfo/default.mspx
Macromedia Captivate: http://www.macromedia.com/software/captivate/

References
"Screencast" Wikipedia entry. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast. Accessed 26 March 2006.

NPD Group. (2005). Macromedia Flash Player Penetration. Available at http://www.macromedia.com/software/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html. Accessed 29 March 2006.

Michael P. Smith
MLIS Candidate
The Information School
University of Washington