Things 5 and 6

You will have to excuse me if things seem a little rushed in this post. I haven't had much time to play around with the things we're exploring this week, but I wanted to write this before I go away for the weekend tomorrow evening. I am going to be singing in this concert - and incidentally, if you fancy an impromptu excursion to Somerset, which I admit is unlikely, there can be no better way of spending your Saturday lunchtime. Plug over.

Thing 5 - screenshots

Although I can't claim to be a master of the art, making screenshots was at least already within my capabilities. I haven't used screenshots in my previous posts in any demonstrative capacity, merely to provide a minimal amount of visual appeal. My attitude is that one picture is better than none (depending on the picture, I suppose). But I had just used the old and cumbersome way of Shift + Print Screen, then pasting into Paint and cropping as necessary, and saving as a PNG to minimize image loss and graininess.

A very brief acquaintance of LightShot is enough to convince me of its value in saving time and effort. After installing the Firefox add-on, it can't have taken me more than 30 seconds to create this screenshot from the BBC homepage with my first attempt:

I haven't tried downloading the LightShot application, but if I find myself using the add-on a lot then I'll explore further.

Thing 6 - screencasts

Now we're starting to get outside my comfort zone. I've never done anything like this before. But when it comes to demonstrating a procedure, a video will suit some people better than a series of stills, so I decided to try and make a screencast showing how to place a hold using the King's College webcat. We have an in-house catalogue which operates independently from Newton and LibrarySearch, and it might be useful to be able to direct confused freshers to a demonstrative video.

Unless I have misread the small print, Screencast-o-matic offers only limited functionality free of charge, so it is not possible to do any retrospective editing of picture or sound. Everything has to be executed in a single take, and you cannot add any commentary afterwards, so making a screencast is effectively a performance in real time. No pressure then.

After some tentative experiments, I decided that my video could do with title cards at the beginning and end to brighten it up, which I designed using Paint (very retro of me), and also some background music. I'd have preferred to use a relevant song like this, but thought I'd better choose something which wouldn't present any rights issues. Searching my computer I found a little MIDI arrangement of this song that I'd made at school. I wonder now if it's a bit intrusive, but if it bothers you then you can always turn the sound off. Anyway, without further ado:

I like that Screencast-o-matic shows the movement of the cursor and of each click with little animations to aid the viewer's focus, though I had to be careful to click on each button when I would normally simply press return to save time, remembering that such a demonstration has to spell everything out. I also paced myself quite slowly. Having a piece of music with a set length (about 40 seconds) helped me in this respect - my first attempts would have been too fast for most newbies to follow.

I uploaded my screencast to YouTube and called it 'How to place a hold', but didn't give it any tags. Perhaps if I had, there might be a more germane selection of videos in the right-hand column instead of i.e. 'How to pick a lock'.

It's been really fun exploring these things, especially screencasts, and if I get a bit more fluent I can see them both being useful tools in the library.