New Tutorial on Video Streaming Services at College of Charleston Libraries

In an effort to gear up for our Surviving the VHS Apocalypse and Thriving in the Stream LITE session being offered this Thursday, February 72013 at 3pm – 4:20pm in Addlestone Room 120 we have created a new tutorial that introduces video streaming services available at College of Charleston Libraries.  Not signed up?  There are still seats available!  Be the first on your block to ease your fear and learn to thrive through the Video Apocalypse.  Register online at the link below.

http://survivethevhsapocalypse.eventbrite.com

Can’t make it?  Make sure to watch our new tutorial, which covers where to find streaming video (Alexander Street streaming video and Films on Demand), how to insert streaming video into your OAKS course (for faculty), where to find a streaming version of Killing Us Softly 4: Advertisings Image of Women, and how to locate streaming video in the Library catalog!

Submitted by: Jolanda-Pieta (Joey) van Arnhem, College of Charleston Libraries.

Food for Fines April 12-18

The College of Charleston’s Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library will celebrate National Library Week by accepting canned food items to reduce library fines. From April 12 through 18, each can will remove one dollar in library fines. All cans collected will be given to the Lowcountry Food Bank to help with their relief efforts.

“This is our way of helping the campus and the community during tough economic times,” said James Williams, head of circulation services. “Our hope is that we’ll encourage patrons with fines to return overdue books to the library while keeping cash in their pocket. With the current state of our economy, the Food for Fines campaign allows our patrons to pay outstanding fines with donations of canned food rather than with cash.  One dollar will be waived for each can of food donated.”  During this week-long campaign, students and Friends of the Library who do not have outstanding fines are also encouraged to donate canned food.  Large collection boxes will be placed in the Circulation Department to receive canned food.  At the end of each shift, the boxes will be emptied and the canned food will be stored in a secure location.

The Library cannot accept cans that are damaged, dented or beyond their expiration date.  The cost of the food item is not considered. Fines for lost or damaged library items not included. Up to $25 may be paid with canned items.

For more information, contact James Williams at 843.953.8004.

Visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6LH9Uwp7bQ to watch the Food for Fines promotional video!

15 Minutes a Day: How to Photosynth

Tracy, Jared, Jerry and I have been exploring Photosynth technology, which creates 3-D environments from overlapping photographs.  With a little screen capturing, some Public Domain music from Internet Archive and a bit of video editing we turned it into a little tour for the library.  If your curious how we did it we will be going over the process in an upcoming Thursday@3@Addlestone session.

Curious how we did it? Watch the YouTube video below, read about and download Photosynth for yourself, or watch some other videos:

15 Minutes a Day: Do you need to use that YouTube video in Class?

Recently I was asked how to download a YouTube video and save it to a USB flash drive that could be played in a Technology Classroom.

The downloaded video files are generally in FLV format (Flash Video) which is an Adobe standard for video compression that has become the web standard for delivering online video (replacing Apple QuickTime, AVI, Windows Media and Real rm formats). Why? because Flash Video can be viewed inside Macromedia Flash Players which is shipped by default with most web browsers. The Problem? The FLV files have to be converted to another format if they are downloaded and viewed on your computer (or in this case a technology classroom).

As I was looking around I found a new program (new to me) at http://www.mediaconverter.org/ that allows you to download the file directly from YouTube (or Dailymotion, MetaCafe, Veoh, LiveVideo, Blip.tv and others) and convert it online.

I tested it using a YouTube VLOG file from a classmate and found that it has different saving options (I chose .mov for a Quicktime file but if you are going to use it in a PC technology classroom at the College you might want to use a .avi file instead since I am not positive that they have installed a FLV viewer on the classroom image and the default is likely to be Windows Media for the PC Technology Classrooms and Quicktime for the Apple Technology Rooms)

The conversion took about 10 minutes (for the download and conversion – so if you use this you might want to open it up and get it started and move to something else while it is working).

Some things to note:

Curious? Take a second to look at 10 Interesting Things You Can Do with YouTube or Google Videos. The article includes helpful tips on find free Flash (FLV) players and provides advice on how to split a large FLV file into smaller playable video clips.