Friday, June 19, 2009

Summer 09

We will not be releasing any new podcasts this summer. Our next release will be in August 2009. Here's what we are working on this summer. The first vidcast is a library orientation video that will expose new students to what the library has to offer. The script is already written and we have our actors and costumes. We will begin shooting soon. We are also creating a zombie podcast that will teach students how to do research. This will be used for our information literacy courses. Our third podcast for the summer will be a tour of the library.

Science Fiction Frontiers

This one is a video release of a previous audio libcast. We took pictures all over campus in all kinds of places with all kinds of people and as those of you have done anything like this know very little of it was actually used. None the less I thought this vidcast (video podcast) was great!

It highlights where the new library is located. J and I had a good time playing around in the construction zone where the old library used to be. We also got quite a few curious stares from the construction workers. We had many students around campus wanting to pose for a shot with our actors so we let them. However, most of them did not make it into the vidcast.

In one of our next podcasts the Captain of the USS Enterprise is accused of a dastardly deed. Stay tuned and keep on viewing.

No Such Thing as Gnomes

If you like cute then this podcast is for you. It is about a little girl that is seeing a gnome in the UVU library and the gnome is getting the girl into trouble with her mother. The focus of this podcast is on our family study room, where parents can come study in the library with their children. Let me clarify that it is not a place to leave your child unattended. I was impressed with the acting ability of the young girl. Her expressions and tone of her voice were excellent. Our "mother" and narrator also did a great job as usual.

The idea for this podcast came from a children’s book I read when I was a kid. It was book from the Three Investigators series. An elderly woman, who lived alone, claimed to be seeing gnomes in and around her house carrying pick axes and shovels. Everyone she told about it thought she was insane. The three investigators decided to help her out and get to the bottom of things. Spoiler: Eventually they found that some midgets dressed as gnomes were tunneling from her home into the bank vault next door. They dressed as gnomes so that if someone saw them and told someone else what they saw no one would believe them. The rest of the script came from me, J, and Lesli who added her motherly touch on it (since the rest of us are childless).

Here is the podcast:

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Who Would Win?

This J walking style podcast is made up of the opinion of several students on who they think would win some character match ups from our "who would win" contest.

The "who would win" podcast came from an idea that I had when I was talking with J about matching up movie/book characters against each other. Originally it was called "if they fought." We thought it would be fun to use this idea for our yearly national library week event. The event featured a March madness type of bracket that patrons could fill out. At the top of the bracket they would write in their ultimate winner of all the match ups. Match ups were created from characters from books and movies located in the UVU collections. Some match up examples are: Jason Bourne vs. James Bond, Hagrid vs. Chewbacca and Willy Wonka vs. Pee Wee Herman. The bracket can be seen at http://www.uvu.edu/library/brackets.html.

The contest portion was implemented online. Patrons voted from our "who would win" poll page. The character that won the online polls must match the patrons bracket winner for them to win the prize. We actually had several patrons that had their bracket winner match the online polls winner. As a result we had to back track a few rounds to see which patron would be the winner of the prize. The prize was a gift card donated from Cinemark theaters. The poll page can be found at: http://www.uvu.edu/library/whowouldwin.html.

This event ended up being a big hit. We had 80 brackets entered in the drawing and 0n average 200 online votes per match up. It was great to hear patrons walking through the library talking about the match ups and why they thought people would win. We even had a few professors participate in the brackets and online voting. We plan to make this a yearly event and hope that next year will be even bigger.

3

3 was a last minute replacement libcast that we did to replace one on Jazz. We just were not feeling it and did not have enough knowledge and experience with Jazz. All of our ideas having to do with Jazz just were not good enough. Our main train of thought was to do a Jazz radio show of some kind.

Those who have seen the television show 24 will recognize that 3 is a parody of it. We were very pleased with how quickly and well it came together. J and I wrote the script. It was so much fun and really turned out for such a small amount of work. Give it a listen; if you've seen 24 you will love this! Those who acted in it were Holley, J, and Trevor.