Library Catalog Usability and a Test of CamStudio

by David Lee King on December 11, 2006

I am playing with CamStudio, and needed to create a short screencast, so…

At the same time, I was looking at Sirsi/Dynix Horizon sites, and found something slightly amusing (to me, anyway) and thought I’d share.

Click the image to the right to watch the video (here’s the .mov version too, if the m4v version doesn’t work for you).

Does anyone else find this amusing? Disconcerting? Can’t we work on making those “nothing found” messages in our ILS/OPAC/Library Catalog systems a bit better? Hmm?

I certainly HOPE so!

And in other news… CamStudio works great! It’s very easy to use. The only thing I had to change right off the bat was to change the audio recording format from an mp3 file to a PCM file (whatever that is). I wanted to edit the screencast with Quicktime Pro – and I was getting silence when playing the video with mp3 audio in Quicktime. Switching to PCM (which I think is an uncompressed audio format) fixed that little problem for me.

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  • http://blog.nekls.org/ Brenda

    OK, you’ve inspired me to try it. Expect a report (or questions :) ) from me soon!

  • http://blog.nekls.org Brenda

    OK, you’ve inspired me to try it. Expect a report (or questions :) ) from me soon!

  • http://brantles.blogspot.com Steve Brantley

    Hello David,
    I went to school with LibraryMan Michael Porter and I am now a Reference and Instruction Librarian in Chicago. I just wanted to let you know our Instruction Coordinator Extraordinaire Helen Georgas has created three tutorials on using our OPAC (Voyager), on finding articles, and on using Academic Search Premier. The tutorials were created in Camtasia (I think) and exported as .swf files. They are here if you want to take a look.
    http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/reference/services/tutorials/tutorials.shtml
    regards, Steve B.

  • davidleeking

    Cool! I’ll check them out…

  • davidleeking

    Cool! I’ll check them out…

  • http://brantles.blogspot.com/ Steve Brantley

    Hello David,
    I went to school with LibraryMan Michael Porter and I am now a Reference and Instruction Librarian in Chicago. I just wanted to let you know our Instruction Coordinator Extraordinaire Helen Georgas has created three tutorials on using our OPAC (Voyager), on finding articles, and on using Academic Search Premier. The tutorials were created in Camtasia (I think) and exported as .swf files. They are here if you want to take a look.
    http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/reference/services…
    regards, Steve B.

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