Import your floorplans into Prezi to create an interactive map

A couple of years ago I wrote about some interactive maps we'd made of the Library, which we used for induction and teaching - they went down very well. The students are much more engaged by a slick Prezi than a tired PowerPoint, and it's also very practical to have information about the library geographically located in a map, rather than in linear slides. So the maps worked really well as stand-alone web objects to be viewed independently by students and staff, as well as actual materials for live presentations and workshops. You can read the post - Student Induction, Libraries, Prezi, and Interactive Maps - here; it also contains an embedded Prezi map, with which to compare the new version I've created below.

In 2012 we tried to improve the maps a little, including embedded a lot of videos in them - things like the virtual tour, but also information at the point of need, for example '1 minute on... how to photocopy and scan' next to where the printer/scanners are on the map.

This year, we did something I've wanted to do from the start, which is import floor plans to Prezi and create the maps based on those. Previously we simply didn't have good enough floor-plans in a format I could use - hence having an outline of the Library buildings (drawn by someone in the Digital Library team), somewhat awkwardly divided up by me using lines and boxes. Now though, we have a MUCH better interactive map, the basis of which is an imported PDF of our floor plans.

Here is the generic map we display on our Info for New Students page (as always I'd recommend going into Full-Screen mode to view this - press the Start Prezi button then once it loads, click the box icon in the bottom-right corner):

We experimented with various ways of representing the different floors: separate maps for each floor, or one map but with box-outs containing the other floors, for example. In the end we opted for making the ground floor plan of the overall building take up most of each ground floor, but with the other floors contained within the same space. (That doesn't make much sense; you'll see what I mean if you look at the map.)

Unexpected benefits

Once again the response from the students was really good. Quite a lot of our induction talks happen as part of wider introductions to the course, from academics, the Student Union, Careers office etc - just the fact that we aren't using PPT and they all are makes the students sit up and take notice. They've often not seen Prezi before so are impressed by the ability to zoom in on different parts of the Library and talk about them. It really does have more impact, and make people more aware of what you're saying about the Library, than a PowerPoint presentation. (And I say that as someone who still likes and uses PPT a lot, including for a lot of teaching.)

That is the expected benefit of using Prezi, but each year another benefit that occurs is the map instigates conversations with the academics. People from the Departments we're presenting in come up to us and want to talk about the Prezi - they're often impressed by it, and they appreciate the fact that the students took notice of it. I really do think I've found it easier to work with departments after they've seen me using Prezi; it serves as a jumping off point / builds bridges. (Bit of a mix of metaphors there but you get what I mean!)

If you want to try making your own interactive map, here's how

The process we followed at York was this:

1. Open a new Prezi and edit the template so it reflected our branding
2. Import the floorplans as a PDF. When you import as a PDF each page of becomes a seperate object on the canvas, to be manipulated: picked up, shrunk, stretched, etc
3. Stretched the overall top-down view of the Library so it was absolutely massive - after all, everything else has to fit inside it
4. Placed the individual building plans within the stretched top-down view
5. Annotated the maps with further information by simply double clicking anywhere on the canvas to type
6. Put in photographs to give the audience a better idea of where they were in the building
7. Embedded YouTube vids at all appropriate places (this is very easy with Prezi - you just need the video's URL)
8. Saved a copy - individual Academic Liaison Librarians then took the generic map and made bespoke versions for each department
9. Made different versions, by copying the maps, to suit specific needs - so edited the 'path' (the order in which the Prezi moves through all the text and pictures on the canvas) to make e.g. 5 or 6 key points only for a 10 minute presentation, or every single thing on the map for the stand-alone web version ..

An example of a different version of the map (as in point 9) is this iteration I made for my History of Art PG students, with subject-specific information added and non-essential path-points taken out:

We also use Prezi for some teaching but not all. So for my History of Art 1st years, with whom I have an hour on Texts and an hour on images, I use PowerPoint for the Finding Texts session, and Prezi for the Finding Images. The latter was created using a Prezi template - these are really good if you need something nice looking in a hurry. It took me around 2 hours to turn my predecessors PPT into the Prezi you see there.

Non-York examples

Here are other takes on the interactive map:

• Pendlebury
• All Saints
• Bodleian Social Sciences
• City
• North Saffordshire
• Royal Holloway .Rop

If you have examples I can add me list, or any comments or questions, let me know below!

How we made a (pretty nice) virtual Library Tour video for almost no money

NB: This post has been in my drafts folder since September 2012! I never got around to finishing it, but I've done so now because anybody who wants to use a similar approach, there's probably just still time to get your video ready for the new academic year if you start right away... Last year at York we launched our virtual tour of the Library - a new video to replace the physical tours we used to do. Here it is:

(This on my YouTube channel because I don't want to artificially inflate our Library YouTube Channel's viewing statistics by sharing that version on here.) I found doing this video one of the most stressful, tiring and rewarding things I've done in my job... This post is all about how we went about it.

Before we go any further, the first thing to say is the video went down extremely well with students and staff. We got great feedback on it, so I think this method works.

The principles

I watched every single virtual tour video I could find before planning this one, and this gave rise to quite a firm set of principles in mind as to how we'd do ours. There are some really goods tours out there, but every video I saw had at least one element I felt I wanted to avoid... So ours was based on the following:

• No scripted scenes. This is a video aimed at students - they can be a cynical bunch, and I wanted to avoid any kind of construct or fakery that might annoy them. For example, the camera just 'happening' upon a reference-interview type situation at the desk, or wide shots of people walking to the next part of the tour - you know these are staged, and it influences the way you perceive the film. Our video would be delivered straight to camera, with people telling the viewer how things work, and showing them directly.
• No librarians on camera. Librarians can be quite bad on camera but that has nothing to do with this principle - we just felt it would be better to have students telling their peers about the Library, rather than us. It's a stronger and more relevant connection.
• Professionally shot, informally delivered. This was a really hard blend - it had to look professional but it needed to be as informal as possible. So the informality comes from the script, which I encouraged the students featuring in the film to change if need be, so it was more like their natural way of expressing themselves.
• No big theme, attempts to be funny, or over production. We wanted to avoid anything that would date quickly, or fall flat, or leave us open to accusations we were spending too much money on videos and not enough on resources...
• No barrier to watching the film. I saw some tours which were QuickTime vids or more sophisticated things than video, but often they needed to be downloaded, or didn't work on certain platforms, or were otherwise tricky to access in some way. This would be a YouTube video, pure and simple. It means we can embed it anywhere, and it's discoverable online.
• Benefits not AND features. Normally I'd advocate talking about the benefits of something rather than the features - it's marketing rule 101. But in this case, we really do have to tell people about the features of the library because that's what a tour does - so I at least tried to add in some benefits too, hinting at the recent studies showing students who use the library most get the best grades, for example.
• Short and to the point. I ideally wanted the video to be under 5 minutes - in fact it's around 6-and-a-half because there's a lot of library to cover and we didn't want to sacrifice usefulness for the sake of hitting a particular figure in terms of timings. But it is as short as we could possible make it. .

The people involved

We employed a Marketing Intern specifically to make videos for us (a genius idea by Michelle Blake!) - he was with us for 3 months, working 2 days a week (the maximum allowed). His name was Balam Herrera, he was a Production Postgraduate in the Theatre, Film and Television Department here at York, and he was absolutely brilliant. I managed him and the video project - as well as the Virtual Tour, we made around 15 short films too (more on that in a future post).

(By the way here's Balam's website: www.balamh.com - I can't recommend him highly enough, he was great to work with.)

We also employed students from the same TFTV department, to present. They had camera experience, and knew how to get a lot done in a short space of time - this was vital to the success of the project in my view.

The camera equipment we borrowed from the University's A/V department.

I no longer have the figures to hand (the perils of not finishing off a post for 10 months!) but basically it cost us under £300 to do, between the intern wages and the student presenters. (That excludes my time setting it all up, but we'd be paying for that anyway...)

The process

Putting together this video happened approximately like this. I wrote a script for what I wanted to be said, and sent it round various senior managers and marketing people for approval and changes. I asked the Chair of TFTV's Board of Studies to send round an ad recruiting for presenters on my behalf (more credible coming from him than from the Library). I watched a lot of YouTube videos as a method of auditioning those that applied without taking lots of time out to meet them all, and chose the three presenters you see in the film above. We set a date. I gave Balam the script. He turned it into a proper shooting script - I'll embed it below, and when you see it you'll realise how important it is to have someone who knows what they're doing with film-making! Then Balam did as much of the filming as he could beforehand - all establishing shots, external time-lapse stuff - anything without the students in, essentially.

Then we filmed it, and edited it, and promoted it A LOT.

Filming it

We filmed it in a day. Even though we did it all between 9 - 5 it felt like the longest day of my life! I was completely wiped out by it - but it was fun too. Here's our shooting script - hopefully gives you an idea of the level of planning that went into this:

Library Tour Shooting Script

If you watch the video and compare you can see how things evolved on the day - we didn't stick completely strictly to the plan.

Generally speaking we got things within a few takes - there were no long sections so the students were able to briefly check their scripts before each shot, then deliver their lines. A lot of time was spent re-shooting the same scene from closer in (we only had one camera), or waiting around for people to stop doing noisy refurbishments which were going on in the Library at that time. In the end we got one student back to reshoot a scene a month later because our catalogue changed - 10 points if you can spot the scene in which he's wearing a different top because the one he wore the first time was in his parent's linen basket back home!

Editing it

Editing it took a LOT longer than filming it - Balam did that on his own, and at great speed, but it still took several days. We had, in total, 120 gig's worth of footage! I tried so hard not to be one of those incredibly annoying managers who makes people change tiny things at great length so it was perfect, but I'm afraid that's pretty much exactly what I was like. We had about 4 drafts in the end, but I was completely delighted with the results.

I wrote the music as a temporary measure until we licensed something proper, but then we ran out of time so had to use mine! We also meant to do a separate version with text on the screen, but ran out of time for that too - all of our other videos have text on the screen so they can be watched without the need for sound, but this one just has a link to a transcript, which isn't ideal.

Promoting it

Although a video is in itself a piece of marketing, it still needs to be marketed. So we tweeted about it (and by the way, tweeting a link to something once does not constitute marketing - if it's important, you need to tweet about it at least four times at different time of the day to catch different audiences) a huge amount, we blogged about it, we embedded it on all of our subject-specific libguides, we embedded it on our 'welcome to new students' pages, we played it in Induction sessions, and we emailed key people within departments to ask them to promote it. It's had, at the time of writing, over three-and-a-half thousand views - the stats tell us in real terms it's had 10,700 minutes worth of viewings. It's hard to imagine any other way of getting that much targeted library information into our students! Around 60% of people watch it on YouTube itself, 30% on embedded version in various places around our website, 8% on mobile devices, which is lower than I'd've expected.

If you want to try something similar…

First of all, start soon - now if at all possible! Tap into the local talent - if your HEI has a film studies department, then you have a pool of talented and willing people to help you do this. Prioritise the key videos you want to do and shoot them first. If you can't afford expensive software, Camtasia is really good for live-action stuff as well as screen-capture. Oh and this guide to marketing with video may be useful.

It's really, really important to promote the heck out of your tour. It's so much effort, you can't risk not getting any reward! Promoting it does not mean putting it in the VLE and mentioning it in the news section of the Library website - it means raising awareness as to the video's value via several media at once.

Good luck!

Any questions, leave them below.

Running sessions on Web 2.0 tools for researchers

Edit: This post has been sitting, completed and tagged, in my drafts folder for over a month - it was meant as a direct follow up to a previous post (linked below) but then the gender and digital idenity thing came up (which is now EVERYWHERE in the media - glad the issue is getting proper coverage) and after that my second daughter was born, so it all got pushed back... Anyhow, here it is. I recently ran a suite of 3 workshops, collectively entitled Becoming a Networked Researcher. I've put all the presentation materials elsewhere on the blog, so check them out if you're interested. This post covers the approach, what worked, what didn't, and general stuff about librarians getting involved with running researcher events that cover new online tools.

It's definitely time to do this

I've been wanting to do workshops like these for years... I run workshops for information professionals so I know how valuable it can be to learn about these tools - and blogs like the LSE Impact Blog show that in Higher Education generally, more and more people are finding Web 2.0 essential. As info pros a lot of us have this knowledge, so why not share it with an academic community who will be grateful for it and will benefit from it?

Previously some people may have thought I was something of a stuck record on this topic - just banging on about Twitter because it was what I knew about, when actually the Library should be focusing more on the traditional things we do with Researchers. (No one directly said this to me so I may well just be projecting!) But the thing about stuff like this is it opens doors - it positions the library or librarian as expert, and gains us respect. It means researchers become more open to the other things we have to offer.

Anyhow, demand for these sessions was huge. We're going to be running them twice a year from now on as once isn't enough. So if you have expertise in this area, try and make something happen!

What to cover?

I'd previously run an 'Enhancing your online reputation' workshop for academics which mainly covered blogs and twitter only, due to time constraints - I still see these as the big two. They're arguably the two most important platforms or tools, and they're definitely the right foundations on which to build a useful presence.

I also ran a taster session on online tools for academics which covered no less than 9 different things - interestingly, lots of them put in their feedback forms that of all the tools we covered, they'd want more training on Prezi. So I put Prezi into the collaboration and dissemination session, but actually it needs its own bespoke training really - it's too big to cover as part of something else.

I put in Academia.edu because I think it's actually quite useful, I put in LinkedIn because everyone else TELLS me it's useful, I put in Slideshare because I think it's the great underrated secret weapon of communicating ideas. I left out ResearchGate because I'd heard they're pretty aggressive in emailing people once they sign up, in a way which is annoying.

Anyhow, the Blogging session and Twitter session were much more successful than the other session, so I'd advise starting with these, and adding more if there's demand.

What worked

• Collaborating with RDT. The Researcher Development Team are nothing to do with the library, but thankfully they're open to collaboration. I managed to meet up with Russell Grant, who runs a couple of social media courses anyway, and suggest the suite described above to build on what he'd already done - in theory, an academic could have attended his two workshops and then my three workshops and they'd have all worked together, building knowledge and understanding. I really like working with departments outside the library generally - not least because then the events aren't 'Library events' that no one shows up for, they're University events which happen to be delivered by a librarian
• They What, Why, Examples, How method. I try do this in most of my training. You have to introduce a tool and tell an audience what it is - but it's vital to then go on to why they might want to use it before you go into the detail of how it works... With relevant examples if at all possible. Lots of the feedback suggests people really value this approach.
• Enthusiasm. I'm really enthusiastic about these topics, and that always helps...

What didn't

• Doing the workshops with only one-day gaps between them - I felt like it completely defined my week and didn't leave much room for anything else
• Not enough example - I tried to put loads in (academic examples specifically) but I could always use more
• The Collaboration and Dissemination session tried to fit too much into the time. We're splitting it up in future (see below)
• I can't make LinkedIn sound exciting... I know it's important. Everyone says it's important, researchers particularly. But I can't seem to convey its value well
• Some logisitical stuff to do with rooms and timing, with which I won't bore you now...

Future plans

We're running a tweaked programme in the next academic year, and it's going to be different in a few ways.

• It'll be run twice, once in the Spring and once in the Summer - the Autumn term is just too crazy for everyone concerned
• It'll have one session per week. Last time round I did all three sessions in a week and I'm not sure that really benefited the participants much - it just made me feel like I was having a crazy week
• There'll be a blogging session as before, a Twitter session as before, but the Collaboration and Dissemination session we're splitting up into two. We're doing a Prezi session, and then a 'social networks for researchers' session - I've asked a colleague from the Researcher Development Team if he can do the latter, because I think he'd be better at it than me
• I'm splitting the blogging and Twitter sessions into a 'PhD and Masters researchers' session and an 'academics' session - there's 90% crossover between those two groups, but the other 10% I found it frustrating only giving examples that worked fully for one or other group. Seeing as the sessions were over-subscribed anyhow, we may as well provide targeted workshops for each group
• So what this means is, in consecutive weeks we're offering an Introduction to Social Media (talk, given by my colleague Russell Grant), Enhacing your Online Reputation (workshop by Russell), Blogs (workshops, by me - one for postgrads and one for academics), Twitter (workshop, by me - workshops, by me - one for postgrads and one for academics), Social Networks For Researchers (workshop, by Rusell) and Prezi (workshop, by me). All one and a half hours except the Prezi one which needs to be 3hrs - I've tried teaching Prezi in less but it doesn't really work... .

Exciting stuff!

Becoming a Networked Researcher: a suite useful of presentations

Web 2.0 tools have finally moved firmly beyond the 'potential fad' stage, to gaining widespread acceptance as valuable weapons in the Researcher's arsenal. Statistics about social media are almost meaningless because a: there's so many of them and b: the information becomes outdated quickly, but at the time of writing it's thought that around 70% of academics use social media for personal use, and in my view we've most definitely reached the tipping point where social media's utility for professional use is properly understood. This is directly linked to the 'impact agenda' - the research shows that blogging about and tweeting about research results in more citations for that research, and pretty much everyone wants more citations. But becoming a networked researcher is about more than the REF-related bottom line, it's about being part of a mutually beneficial, supportive, and intellectually engaging community.

With all that in mind, I ran a suite of hands-on workshops at my institution, the University of York, on behalf of the Researcher Development Team. The suite was entitled 'Becoming a Networked Researcher' and it covered firstly blogs and blogging, then collaboration and dissemination, and finally Twitter. Rather than divide these up into three blog posts I thought the most useful thing to do would be to have them all here - so below you'll find various links to, or embedded versions of, presentations and handouts for the course. I've tried to make it so they work without me there to talk over the top of them...

The workshops themselves were really enjoyable and the researchers themselves very enthusiastic and engaged - a whole bunch of blogs and twitter accounts have already sprang up since they ran!  But I'd like to improve them for next time around (we'll be running them twice a year from now on); whether you're a Masters / PhD researcher, an academic, or an information professional reading this, I'd be interested in your views on how useful these materials are, and any advice or tips or, particularly, examples, I should be referring to in future sessions.

The workshop materials

The three parts of the suite were designed to work together and separately - if you're only interested in one aspect of becoming a networked researcher, you don't need to look at the materials from the other sessions.

Part 1: Blogs and Blogging

Blogs and Blogging was the most successful session. The advice here is slightly York-centric in that we all have Google accounts, so we all automatically have Blogger blogs; if you're reading this at another insitution it's definitely worth considering Wordpress.com as your blogging platform. Better still, Wordpress.org, although that requires some technical knowledge.

Here's the Prezi presentation:

And here's the handout which goes with it:

Blogs for researchers: workshop handout by University of York Information

Part 2: Dissemination and Collaboration

I've decided against embedding the materials for this one - there was a lot more group and collaborative work and the session was slightly shorter, so my presentation doesn't cover as much ground. But you can view the Dissemination and Collaboration Prezi here (the handout doesn't really add anything); it covers LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Prezi itself, and Slideshare.

Interestingly, I really struggled to convince people as to the value of LinkedIn. I'm suspect of the value of LinkedIn myself, but I've heard countless researchers talk about how important it is, so I flagged it up as a key resource anyway...

Part 3: Twitter for Researchers

I really enjoyed this as I think Twitter is such a vital tool for modern scholarship and communication - you can see the Slides from the session here:

Twitter for Researchers from Ned Potter

And the handout is here:

Twitter for academics: workshop handout by University of York Information

Any questions, comments or queries, leave them below.

#EdTech: 9 useful online tools to share with the academic community

A while back I blogged about a session I'd run for academics on the academic skills and digital literacy we teach at York. The point of blogging was to say that what the academics were really interested in was not what we taught the students, but how they themselves could become digitally literate. With that in mind I decided to put on a session for academics on exactly that. It was to be a taster menu on 9 different EdTech tools that they might find useful in the Higher Education environment, for engaging students, boosting reputation, and their own research.

Importantly it wasn't to be a library session - I wanted people to actually show up, after all... I asked the central Learning & Teaching Forum if I could deliver it as part of their workshop schedule - it just happened to be delivered by a librarian. Recent experiences suggested York was completely ready for this sort of thing (and indeed we had to move the room to a bigger venue as nearly 60 academics signed up for the session) - if you don't read any more of this post my message would be, if you think you could run a Web 2.0 type session for lecturers and / or researchers, do it! They're really enthusiastic about it - it's no longer seen as a fad or a waste of time.

Anyhow, here's the presentation I used:

For anyone really enthusiastic, the full hour and a half session was recorded too; here's where you can watch the presentation and hear my talk at the same time.

So, how did it go? The answer is really well - the group were very enthusiastic, and the feedback forms were extremely positive with only one exception. One lecturer I really like actually left the room almost in a daze, backing away saying 'Ned, I think you've solved something I've been trying to sort for ages, one of these tools is what we need...' and ran off to investigate there and then! :)

What worked

• The focus was on tools that helped solve existing problems - some Web 2.0 stuff seems to create its own problems which it then solves... This was based on tools that already fitted into the fabric of academic life
• It wasn't a hands-on session but I encouraged as much discussion as possible, questions and sharing of experiences, so that it wasn't just me banging on about stuff at the front
• The What, Why, How, Tips type format I use in a lot of my training also worked well here - it's really important to tell people why they'd find a tool useful BEFORE you tell them how to use it
• It was the right thing at the right time - lots of the feedback comments were things like 'This is exactly what I wanted!' - had I tried to do this when I first got to York 2 years ago, for example, I'm not sure that would have been the case
• It was matter of fact and practical. One academic said they'd been attracted by the lack of 'platitudes and concepts' which he said dominated most courses and workshops they were offered... The whole point of the session was to give people things they could DO right away which helped them in their actual real lives .

What didn't

• I think 9 was probably too many tools for the time. I should have done 7 perhaps - I felt like I was really galloping through everything. It was meant to be a taster-menu, but still
• As with every training session ever, a couple of people found some of it too simplistic and a couple of other people found some of it too complicated - I'm not sure there's a silver bullet for this issue, really, I'd love to know if anyone's cracked it
• A couple of people commented that they found Part 2 more useful than Part 1, but Part 1 was the more substantial section. If I run it again (and I probably will) I'll try and put greater emphasis on the teaching tools rather than the social media side of things
• I should have used more academic examples. (I told myself I'd be using loads of examples in the Becoming a Networked Researcher hands-on workshops I'm running at the moment - but much of the audience is different for these, so it's really not relevant to tell myself that!) .

Incidentally, there was a really interesting conversation (which I didn't feel qualified to contribute much to) about the nonsense female academics have to put up with online; or indeed any prominent females have to endure. It seems that as soon as your level of exposure reaches a certain point - my unscientific guess is, when you've been on TV just once - there will be some idiots who will take advantage of the net's relative anonymity to say unpleasant or creepy things. If this is a subject you're interested in, I'd highly recommend reading about Sara Perry's Gender and Digital Culture project, which is looking to tackle the issue.

So as you can probably guess by now, I'm really pleased that we've reached a tipping point and there's enthusiasm in the academic community for the potential applications of Web 2.0 tools. This is an area lots of librarians are interested in, so I really think it's a great time to offer up your knowledge and expertise to a grateful audience in HE. There are a few institutions doing this, and it seems to be working for all of us.