Media Sharing group project: Week 12

When I originally chose the media sharing topic, I chose it
because I was really interested in media issues and especially in media sharing
sites such as YouTube and Flickr.  It
seemed like a natural fit for me, and, ultimately it really was.

First off, I'll introduce our group project.  Carolyn, Dillon, Greg and I were lucky in
that we all seemed to agree on what we should focus on for the group project,
and we all really had complimentary skills and interests to contribute.  You can find the result of our efforts posted
at our Wiki (you will have
to create a user account; the invite key is the first word in the title of our
course *hint hint*).

As my teammates have already described, the creative process
for our imaginary library took several steps, ending up as being "Your
Library", an "every-library" as Dillon described.  I happened upon the concept accidentally,
since I kept referring to "your library" in my videos and realized
upon re-watching that it gave something of a democratic or client-focussed feel
to the library we were creating.  Since
my teammates graciously accepted my idea, the "Your Library" concept
works, and I think it's appealing in the same way that YouTube is, or the Nintendo
Wii.  Each of these were developed with
the pun-in-name intended to try and reach out to users, and I feel that in a
library setting, it would be very appealing to potential clients, not to mentioning
being a great excuse for a cheesy tagline(s)!

As you have already seen, Caroyln headed up the audio side
of our presentation, completing a couple of PodCasts to share, while Dillon
created some informational slides for users. 
Greg headed up the photo-sharing side of things, and also came up with
the idea for the Wiki.  In the end we all
made a great effort and I would be confident in saying that we all worked
together well and came in with similar expectations and left feeling that
everyone did their share.

Perhaps you're wondering what, specifically I did, aside
from come up with a catchy title (though you've probably already read it on my
teammates' blogs or saw it via the links we provided!)?  I recorded a series of six YouTube videos
introducing library users to the services available at Your Library as well as
offering basic instruction on the use of these services.  I favourited several library-related videos
(some for fun, others for more serious content).  It was my opinion that a YouTube channel
should not only be about promotions, but also about that sense of community and
sharing, and (at least a little bit of) entertainment. :) I am also happy to
add other videos if you have suggestions, to try and carry on with the notion
of media sharing.

Although my videos were of poor quality (at least by professional
standards) and were off-colour, one thing I did intentionally choose was low
resolution and low frames per second (320X240 resolution at 15 frames per
second).  I made this choice because I
wanted the videos to be compact and accessible to those users who may have
lower-bandwidth connections.  Given that
nothing I was doing required (or even would benefit from) high-definition, I
wanted to make my videos as widely-accessible as possible.  Similarly, I wanted to keep the videos to
two-minutes or less (preferably close to one minute) to make them
quick-to-download and also quick to watch. 
To me, if an informational video is too long, the user will lose
interest, which automatically turns her or him away from your organization.

One thing that we really focused on with our topic (and that
I am especially proud and satisfied with!) was demonstrating the variety of
ways that media can be shared by libraries to provide service and information
to users.  Combined with the readings and
case studies for this week, our aim was to show the class how important and
useful media sharing tools are to any library environment.  Since many of the services we used are
free-to-access it only costs as much money as bandwidth, production and
salaries might total (this, of course, is not free, but it is considerably less
costly than some of the other Web 2.0 technologies we have encountered this
term).

The last note I would like to offer is some insight into why
our group decided to write four separate blogs instead of one inclusive
blog.  Given the democratic nature of our
group effort for this presentation, as well as the fact that we each worked on
a different form of media, it was agreed upon that we all may have more to
contribute by writing of our own experiences instead of creating one
descriptive blog.  To counteract the
rather "shattered" nature of this method, we followed-up by using the
Wiki as a showcase for our project as a coherent whole.

Since I'm the last of my teammates to write a blog, I guess
I'll sign off for all of us.  Thanks so
much for your interest in our topic and we hope you've learned a little about
the concept of media sharing and how it relates to libraries by visiting our
Wiki.  If you have any questions,
comments or even suggestions for additions to our resources, please don't
hesitate to let us know and we'll do our best to "share" the items in
a relevant way!

(NB: sorry about the formatting issues here.  It seems MS Word has struck again!)