Screencasting

I was defeated by Thing 6. I tried to make a screencast to demonstrate how to reach and search LISA, the bibliographic database for library and information science, starting from the University Library’s home page. It took several takes to get a convincing performance out of myself, with decisive mouse sweeps and accurate typing. (Even then, I found the result almost too boring to watch through.) I spent more minutes fiddling with the timing of some simple captions, then by accident closed the Screencast-O-Matic window.

I decided my film wasn’t worth remaking. Anyway, the grapes were sour: screencasting hadn’t excited me. For what’s at bottom a series of menu choices, I wondered if the putative puzzled person would find it quicker to take in written instructions, and easier to refer back to them. But really, this only shows that I couldn’t think of a truly visual library computer task (the LibrarySearch word cloud is disqualified). If I needed to know how to design a bridge in TurboCAD, visualise experimental data in Matlab, or complete Quake in twelve minutes, I’d look for a screencast first.