Thing 8: Infographics

I'm being asked to consider a report that I recently produced or read. The thing I can think of is a draft strategic plan. I'm being asked if an infographic would better represent the data. I can't find the document to look at it again, but I think infographics certainly make things easier to read. I'm being asked what impact it would have on the reader. Well, it would give a good snapshot of the main points of the plan. I remember seeing infographics produced by Fingal County Council for their annual report and they were really good. You could see statistics clearly so could understand the scale of the services provided.

I have to put together an informative poster or graphic using Piktochart or Canva. I've tried using Piktochart before (with some success) and I'm going to try Canva this time, as when I was on a committee that's what a colleague used to make a conference poster.

This is my infograph! It's very simple (as instructed!) and it's imperfect. If I was doing this properly I would have selected things for children of a specific age, rather than including things for both younger and older children. But the point of the exercise is to get familiar with using Canva, so it's fine.

Once I realised I had to upload my own images (all taken from Pixabay), I did the task fairly quickly. The template I used was the first one - "6 fun ideas to raise money for charity". I made the minimal amount of changes. I messed around with other things but my proposed headings were too long and were taking up too much space on the templates, and there's really no need for that for this task. Thanksfully, I came up with this shorter heading, based on the template! This was a daunting task at the start but really didn't take too long to complete, and I found the instructions provided by R23 really helpful. I followed them closely and got the task done!

Thing 7.5: Storytelling

This element of R23 is not compulsory but I'll give it a go. We can use Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook. I'll go with FB as that's what I'm used to.  I can see Stories on my phone but I don't see the paper airplane icon. I've watched a few stories. The best is one from the Happy Pear where they are showing a photo of Black Forest Gateaux from their new book, along with the photos of the recipe pages in the book. Yum! Very good use of the function! Ha, and on their main Facebook page where they talk about the story they refer to World Book Day! They say people can screenshot the recipe to make during the Beast from the East. Great marketing all round!

I can make this recipe for my dad's birthday. I had to learn how to take a screenshot (hold down volume down button and power button at the same time). Sceenshots go into Gallery. I also accidentally discovered you can video record the screen. I did this, but then deleted it when I figured out how to take the screenshots. This is very useful! :-)

The R23 post says you can only see a story once. However, I went into the Happy Pear story many times.

I made a Story using a photo from my gallery, which I sent just to my partner. I added a sticker and special effects.

Thing 7: Online Exhibitions

I've been thinking about R7 for a few days now. It seems really hard! I was thinking about what I have and what I could use. I looked at some other entries and saw not everyone did R7. Someone did a family tree. Someone didn't do an exhibition but blogged about the ones they looked at. Things I have around me are Special Olympics memorabilia, magazines I was involved in producing, and lots of cat photos. I thought some more and concluded I could make an exhibition about my Sylvanian Family "collection". (For some of my other ideas I'm unsure about copyright restrictions.)

The R7 post said to use other exhibitions for inspiration. I Googled "online exhibition" and found that there is a Harry Potter exhibition thanks to the British Library. The Irish Times had an article about it. The exhibition uses Google Arts & Culture. That platform was covered in R7.

Here is a sample poster about the physical exhibition, from when it was in Madrid. Here is a book on the exhibition. Here's a guide that's on Pinterest.

And here is the online exhibition!

In thinking about my own exhibition, I'm looking at the Sylvanian Families site. I see they are not just targeting children, as they have a more grown up site too!

Here is my online toy exhibition. It's on Blogger. Let's keep it simple. I tried to set up pages but I couldn't view them in the blog so I copied and pasted the content into posts. I added a picture to the homepage but then it wouldn't show the name of the blog so I scrapped it. Eventually it let the pages be viewed by clicking the icon on the home page, and I ended up with two logs of pages as well as the posts. I kept the posts and one lot of pages! So it all involved a lot of experimenting and time! But it's done! :-)

Thing 6: Reflective Practice

Description

For Thing 3: Image Banks I had a choice of using an image from Pixabay or Flickr. As I said in my blog I chose Flickr as I am well used to Pixabay (thanks to its promotion by members of the Health Sciences Libraries Group over the years).

For Thing 4: Communicating Visually  I had great fun with Photofunia. You can put your own photo onto an image to create an advertisement for the library.

For Thing 5: Video Presentations I struggled along with Screencast-O-Matic.

Feelings

It took me ages to start Thing 5 as I was changing jobs and I wanted to work on material with personal meaning. Eventually I decided the public library’s e-resources are the way to go. I was so pleased to have a topic. The task took way longer than I had anticipated. I had to learn about how to turn off the sound. We had a laugh at home when I accidentally recorded a conversation while making my video. Everything worked out in the end, after a number of retries over a number of days. I could see how to do it, it was just getting all the bits right that delayed things. My video was initially too long. I wanted it to be shorter so it would be more interesting to people.

Evaluation & Analysis

I had used this programme before during the previous Rudaí 23 when I made a video about databases through this site: www.idaal.com. I still found it a challenge, as it was some time since I did it before! I learned to be patient and if I wasn’t happy with the result to take a break and then try again. 

Conclusion and Action Plan

I’m happy that this task gave me an opportunity to learn about the library’s e-resources, so I can better help borrowers. I’m glad I waited until I came up with something worthwhile to make a video of. I feel confident for having completed the task. 

Thing 5: Video Presentations

Video

It's taken me a few attempts to get to grips with Screencast-O-Matic. It's good though. First I had to learn to lose the audio (keyboard and voice!). My boyfriend helped. Then to make it short enough. I showed how to read a magazine on your laptop courtesy of your public library (in this case Dublin City Council). It was great as it was something I wanted to learn. I put off this Rud as I was changing jobs and didn't know what to do. But it became clear in the end.

Youtube is really slow to do some edits (i.e. to add audio).

Thing 4: Communicating visually

I'm going to use Photofunia because I was aware of it and had looked into a little bit from when Niamh O'Sullivan (Irish Blood Transfusion Service) wrote about it in HINT (https://hslgblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/hint-eahil-special-issue/).

I've now installed the App on my phone. I found an image of records and my boyfriend kindly posed playing the trumpet in order for me to advertise live jazz music in the library! That was fun.

https://twitter.com/Graceih/status/911706872973074437

Thing 3: Image banks - Flickr

This is an image from Flickr. It is labelled for commercial use. The other option was to use Pixabay, but I use it a lot so I went for Flickr. This task was quite easy, though I did have to read the instructions carefully. I would like to work in a library where everyone uses Flickr to promote the library.