Annual Saturday: (Screen)Casting a Wide Net

The RUSA MARS Hot Topics Discussion Group presented a panel discussion on screencasting Saturday: "Casting a Wide Net: Using Screencasts to Reach and Teach Library Users." Committee co-chair Michelle Jacobs was not in attendance, so–appropriately enough–she introduced the session via screencast. Eric Frierson of the University of Texas at Arlington demonstrated how his library's online catalog used embedded screencasts, with links to videos such as "Where's the PDF?", "I need peer-reviewed", or "Bad Results" appearing when users are likely to need them. The education subject guide he built also features a welcome video prominently to make the quantity of material less overwhelming. "What I’m trying to do is build a comfort level, particularly with distance education students who will never meet me,” Frierson said. Mick Jacobsen of Skokie (Ill.) Public Library offered a public librarian's perspective on screencasting, observing that patrons do are interested in information rather than reference sources. "Very few people come to learn to use Reference USA," he noted. "They wouldn't know what we're talking about. But they would respond to 'Do you want to find more customers?'" Carmen Kazakoff-Lane, distance education librarian at Brandon University in Manitoba, demonstrated the Animated Tutorial Sharing (ANTS) Project, a collaborative project among librarians to create and share tutorial videos across institutions.