Legal Research

Screencasting triumph

By Shaunna Mireau

I attended an American Association of Law Libraries webinar on screencasting and podcasting this week. I heard about this session via Slaw and decided to attend to see if this tech would fit in nicely with our current Intranet offerings.

Kerry Fitz-Gerald, Reference Librarian, Seattle University School of Law Library and Rita Kaiser, Reference Services Librarian, King County Law Library educated and inspired me. The session was just over an hour, and due to my longitunal location ran from 11 a.m. to 12ish.

I was so inspired, I bought a headset with a mic at lunch, and proceeded to avoid the November budgeting process for my library by creating a my first ever screencast. The 3.5 minute video I made with with CamStudio shows our internal process for gathering a case from WestlaweCarswell and downloading it. The target audience are legal assistants who have just been issued passwords for WeC.

My hope is that offering up this canned process will encourage users to look to our Intranet for those how-to bits in the moment when they need something. I plan to measure the statistics on views of the video to see if there is a diminishing rate of return on my 2 hour investment of creating it. With luck, the metrics will show that investing time and energy into creating screen casts in our environment is:

• viable - the technology piece does not create a bunch of calls to our helpdesk on using the video format
• efficient - the learning objective for training staff to download cases from a service they haven’t used before is met
• sustainable - we can overcome barriers to creating these pieces and offer other objects using this tech
• cost effective - using the free software piece and the support of our wonderful IT group gives us a professional product to deliver

More info?
An overview of screencasting from Wikipedia.
Rita has posted a great bibliography for How to Train Without Showing Up.
A video is available on using CamStudio.

So, as a credit card commercial might state:
$35 for a training session
$41 for a mic
not a lot for an couple hours of my time to create something I would have to teach 100 people
= Priceless

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on November 13, 2008 (boomark / email).