Having not presented at a conference for two and a half years, I recently presented at two in a week!
In June I wrote about the Rough Edges and Risks talk I did on library social media for a UK event; a couple of days later I presented on my place of work’s user-centred response to the pandemic, for a US event: NEFLIN’s conference. Because of my incredibly unreliable blogging schedule, it’s taken me two additional months to write about this one…
For this presention I was specifically asked to talk about University of York Library and the things we’ve done since March 2020. The slides above detail our Book Takeaway service, social media response, study space bookings and many other things in a timeline.
I’m incredibly proud of York and our response - the trouble with writing or talking about it is it just sounds like platitudes. ‘Incredibly user focussed’ is such a buzz-wordy phrase but that’s what we were and are. I enjoyed the chance to talk about the way in which we managed to deliver some amazing services during the height of the pandemic, whilst still prioritising staff well-being - it CAN be done.
Here we are with another regular blog-post, following on from the last one a mere [checks notes] 418 days ago!
I was recently invited by Royal Holloway to present at an event they were organising on academic library social media. RH themselves were also presenting, as were representatives from MMU and Liverpool Uni Libraries. The other presentations were all great (see below) and I learned a lot.
My presentation was about the work we do at University of York Library, and in particular how we’ve seen a monumental spike in social media engagement over the last 18 months or so. The slides are here.
It was great to hear talks from four different libraries with four varying approaches (I felt we at York had the most in common with Liverpool but everyone came at it slightly differently. There were so many conferences and events centering on social media a few years ago but you don’t get so many now - it’s still a really key issue though!
I ran a webinar on building engagement on Twitter during this strange lockdown times we live in, for the Living Knowledge Network run by the BL.
I ended up finding some useful tools and examples I’d not seen before as part of the research for it, so I thought I’d share those (and some classics) here, if you’re interested…
Image Resizing
Tweeting images is good: 80% of social media use happens on mobile devices, people scroll at speed - images help slow them down and engage with your stuff. (That said, I see some libraries including an image with literally every tweet. Conversely I actually wouldn’t advise this as it reduces the impact of all of them. Think of images as punctuation to your timeline, rather than the words.) If you make images the right size, people can see all of the image in your tweet, without needing to click on it to expand - which many people won’t do, so it’s good to make the most impact from the image without the need for a click.
The short version of resizing is, make your images 16:9. These are the right proportions to display correctly in a tweet. You can achieve this by using a PowerPoint slide as a template - these are 16:9 in default (since Office 2013 anyway) and you can Save As and choose .png rather than .pptx to save a slide as an image. Or, take an existing image and use photoresizer.com to get it exactly right for Twitter.
Going a step further with this, check out @nanobop’s really handy guide to posting multiple images in the same tweet. The first one in the thread below we’ve already covered, but click on it and read the follow-ups for guides to posting, 2, 3, and 4 pics at once, and the ‘open for a surprise!’ technique.
Sometimes you do something on Twitter and it goes well and you want to capture that success. Storify and a number of other tools have been great for that in the past, but are no longer available.
Step forward Twitter’s own Moments feature. It allows you to pull together the tweets of your choice into a little narrative, with an explanatory note at the top - then share it with whoever you like. Here’s a Moment I put together for my own place of work about a new space we’d launched: I used it to share all the positive feedback with non-twitter-using colleagues (and to make the success story easy to come back to later when I do an annual social media report) - you can view this Moment here.
Another example of using Moments is below - this time just to collate our own tweets and easily share them, rather than documenting feedback. We asked our users to draw our buildings, a challenge they took on so well I ended up using the fabulous Photofunia to put their images into gallery settings… This went down really well, I’d recommend trying it with your own library.
There are millions upon millions of tweets every day (there’s more than 350,000 every minute…) so it’s easy for your own attempts at engagement to get lost amid the noise. One way to help them stand out is to build something more tangible and substantial than separate tweets.
Sometimes friendly institutions ‘war’ with each other on twitter - this epic #AskACurator battle between the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum drew so many eyes to it that it ended up in the papers, as did this more recent ‘creepiest object’ thread. (There are merpeople in both which are just off-the-charts horrend.) In the Library world, the ongoing good-matured spat between the Orkney and Shetland libraries twitter accounts is excellent and benefits both parties.
Threads are just a series of related tweets. If you reply to your own tweet they are connected; if someone finds one they can find the rest. You can build a thread in three main ways - all in one go BEFORE you tweet any of it (by clicking the little + symbol to add another tweet as many times as you need before you click ‘Tweet all’), in real-time where you just add your tweets as you go along - this is good for incorporating feedback and questions from your followers - and over a series of days, weeks, or even years. This example from the Glasgow Women’s Library is a thread tweeted over a month - every day more and more people found out about it and got involved, and because it was threaded rather than discrete tweets, they could find all the previous tweets very easily, whatever point they came in at…
Happy tweeting everyone.
By the way the header image of the balanced stones (from Pexels) was in reference to a bit about balance which I took out of the post above, but I really liked the picture so I left it in, if you’re wondering what that was all about.
Posting to Insta is officially mobile-only, and the desktop version doesn’t have the button to add media. But it’s relatively straightforward to trick your desktop into displaying a mobile view, and then you can post from it directly.
There’s a million articles online about using Instagram from a PC or laptop but they’re all ludicrously complicated or involve using third-party apps etc - none of that is necessary, if you follow the steps below. (The screenshots are from Google Chrome but you can do more or less the exact same thing in Firefox.)
1) Go to instagram.com on your PC, and log in
2) Right click anywhere. You’ll see Inspect listed at the bottom of the menu which appears: click that
Log-in to Insta, right-click, and choose Inspect from the menu
3) You’ll see the html on the right of the screen. At the top of that there’s an icon showing a phone and a tablet - if you hover over it you’ll see it’s called Toggle device toolbar. Click this: the rest of the screen will then display the website on a mobile view. At the top of the screen you’ll see a drop-down menu which allows you to choose what kind of device you want to simulate, so you can choose an iphone or whatever else you want
Choose a mobile device: Chrome will show Instagram as it would appear on that device
4) Now for the absolutely key bit (thank you to my colleagues Hannah and Antonio for getting me up to speed on this part!): refresh the browser using F5 or the Reload page button. You’ll then see the crucial button, missing until now, that you get on your phone: the + in a square which represents ‘Add picture / video’. Pressing it on your PC will open up the usual file explorer, allowing you to navigate to the media of your choice.
Refreshing the website brings up the Add Media button, highlighted in yellow here
5) Choose a Filter if you like, press Next, add your caption, location, tagged people (and in Advanced Settings you’ll find the option to add Alt Tags too) and click Share to post to Instagram.
Why would you want to use Instagram on your desktop in the first place?
This technique is useful for three main reasons in my experience.
The first and most important thing is, Instagram is such a key social media tool for organisations, but not everyone wants organisational accounts on their personal phone. I work with people who’d rather not mix those two worlds and I completely understand that - but I want them to be able to contribute to our Instagram account without having to compromise their principles! This method means everyone can get involved.
The second reason is, if you already have photography on your hard-drive or network drive, it saves having to get that onto your mobile device’s camera roll.
The third thing is, you can write the post at any time of day and it will stay there waiting for you to post it at the time of your choosing (unless, obviously, you close the window / tab / browser). So if you have 5 minutes to compose the perfect Insta post first thing, but don’t want it to go live till the peak time to post later in the day, you can do the work at 9am and actually post it at 3pm.
In September I made a new video to introduce the Library in 60 seconds. It was designed to be played in short Induction talks, and to be embedded in various online guides. The whole thing took around 4 hours to do (albeit spread across a couple of days) and it turned out pretty well - before we go through the step-by-step process here's the video:
It was made using Videoscribe, and they just published their 'Favorite VideoScribe videos of 2019' which, it turns out not only has videos from the BBC but also from our Library! The video above being featured on their list has reminded me to complete this blog post, which has been in the Lib-Innovation drafts folder for a while...
Step 1: Script-writing
Because we were also producing a longer virtual tour, I knew from the start this would be only one minute long. This was surprisingly non-limiting in the end: once you accept you can't go into detail on anything, it becomes quite easy to write a friendly voice-over that introduces a number of key points in quick succession. The purpose of the video was to provide an overview, help students understand the basics, and encourage them to ask for help. So a brief script was worked up with that in mind, and I shared it with a colleague for a second opinion, then with the narrators.
I wanted Yorkshire voices for this introduction to a Yorkshire library, and I wanted people who were friendly and informal, and I wanted it to be a man and a women ideally. Happily my first choice voice-over artists (Sarah Peace from IT and Martin Philip from Academic Liaison) said yes when I asked them to do it!
Step 2: Voice-over recording
The hardest thing about recording narration is finding a suitable acoustic in which to record. Even small meeting rooms in our building seem to be echoey, and although the Linguistics Department does have an audio booth we can get access to, it wasn't available in our time frame. In the end we chose quite a big room that has enough in it to absorb any resonance, leaving us with an acceptable sound quality.
I recorded my narrators on my own laptop using Audacity, a freely available audio-editing tool, and an entry-level Blue Snowball mic I use for webinars. It took 40 minutes to record both this script and the Virtual Tour script, and the main issue was making sure the narrators were close enough to the mic.
Audacity is incredibly simple to use. You can zoom right in on the visual representation of the audio-waves and easily identify what talking and what is not - for example, in-breaths before a word. Breaths and pauses can be selected, highlighted, and deleted. For this reason, there was absolutely no need to aim for a perfect take of the narration. Each narrator took their time delivering their section, re-running any sentence they weren't happy with. It then took me perhaps 20 minutes to edit the audio into one seamless narration, and export it as an MP3 file to add to the video.
The audio for the voice-over, as displayed by Audacity
Step 3: Creating the video with Videoscribe
The process of creating a video with this software is to add objects to the canvas (a little bit like you might with Prezi) and then decide how they are animated, and when. So for example you can just type text in and have a hand or pen 'write' the text at the speed of your choosing, or you can add photographs which can either be 'drawn' or pushed into frame by a hand, or just appear. You put all this together, add music and a voice over you if you wish, and you have a video.
I've tended to always build towards a final picture that includes everything the viewer has just seen - so you see each section as it's added, and then at the end you zoom out to see everything at once. But you don't have to use this approach - you can stay buried in the detail if that helps you tell your story.
The VideoScribe interface looks like this:
The main part of the screen displays everything that will appear in the video, but the boxes along the bottom are how you dictate when objects arrive, how they enter the video, and in which order.
Here's a closer shot of that:
All those icons - the phone, the thumbs up, the wifi symbol etc - are from VideoScribe itself. There's also some writing, and (in the middle) a screengrab of the library catalogue.
Absolutely key to a good VideoScribe video, in my experience, is the 'Set Camera to Current Position' button I've highlighted here:
This allows you to control what the camera sees, meaning you can have multiple objects in the frame at once. For example at the end of the video there's a big smiley face and the #UoYTips text added: by default the camera would zoom in so these filled the frame, meaning you could only really see them. But by setting the camera to the same position for the last three sections of the video, you get to see the entire library map, AND the smiley face / #UoYTips in the same shot.
The whole process of creating the video took around 2 hours: trust me, this is REALLY quick for making video content!
Step 4: Exporting to YouTube
I exported two versions of the video: one directly to YouTube, and one as an MP4 file to embed directly into the Induction PowerPoint presentation me and my colleagues would be using throughout the first week of term.
With the YouTube version there was probably around half an hour of faffing involved - writing the description, title, all the keywords, and so on, and editing the subtitles. YouTube's auto-generated subtitles are actually pretty good, but they contain no punctuation or capitalisation and sometimes get names or other words wrong - in screenshot below you can see it says 'you can get health and advice' which I had to edit to 'help and advice':
It's a relatively quick job and of course well worth doing to make sure your video is accessible.
If you've watched the video above you'll have seen that the narration ends at least 10 seconds before the end - this is because I wanted space to link to another video (the more detailed virtual tour), a clickable thumbnail of which appears in the bottom left of the screen. This was achieved by inserting in YouTube itself, via the End Screens menu. As you can see below, the video itself is designed to receive the thumbnail in that exact position, with the arrow pointing to it.
One final piece of admin was to create a custom Thumbnail for the Library Minute video itself. YouTube auto-generates three for you - normally none of them quite work as an encapsulation of the video, so you have to make your own (either from scratch or, more often in my case, just by taking a screenshot of the video at the best possible moment).
Step 5: Promotion
Even though the video is a piece of marketing, it still needed to be marketed... I saved a version for adding to Induction slides, and then created a slide in which it was embedded for everyone to add to their presentations.
We also tweeted it, put it on Instagram (where it did much less well than I expected, interestingly) and embedded it on key web pages such as our Info For New Students page.
And that's it! Videoscribe is a tool which we pay for on an annual basis - we don't often do this with so many great free tools available, but we feel it's worth it in this case. If you have any questions about the software or the video above, let us know in a comment...
