Perseverance and Play: Making a Movie for the YouTube Generation

Abstract

In place of a traditional library orientation lecture at Fairfield University, librarians created a choose-your-own-adventure movie for use in the classroom with an audience response system (ARS), allowing students to vote using clickers. The library administration took a risk by sponsoring the project, but the library director believed in her staff and let us run with our ideas. When we proposed the movie, we did not have an idea for the script; we simply knew we wanted to make a movie and show it in class. Why did we decide to do this when the status quo wasn't disastrous? Like people in any industry, we were pushing ourselves to change with the times, to make our information delivery more engaging-entertaining even. Working under the charge to constantly evaluate and assess our instruction program, we questioned whether it mattered if librarians or professors liked the lecture. Who was the audience after all? If we were going to be successful, we had to captivate our students, the "Millennials," by showcasing the library, its spaces and its services, as the answer to many of their varied needs: social, educational, and recreational. In pursuit of this end, we worked with the Media Center, recruited student filmmakers, employed plenty of brainstorming, wrote a successful script, and produced Fairfield Beach: the Library. The ingredients were simple: perseverance and play. What follows is how we put them together.

All the world wide web's a stage

“…A number of previous library video projects have sought feedback. For example, Islam and Porter (2008) administered a survey to 492 students who watched the video Fairfield Beach: The Library during library instruction sessions, and the overwhelming majority stated that “the movie contributed either somewhat (47%) or substantially (46%) to their awareness of library services and resources” (p. 24). In an earlier study, Wakiji and Thomas (1997) described how they surveyed over 1,800 students (both undergraduates and graduates) who had watched an eight‐minute film Liberspace about their attitude towards the library and librarians after seeing the video.…”

“…Most of the following discussion will, however, focus on videos that facilitate locating information. It is not the intention here to offer a detailed review of existing papers about academic library videos, as a useful annotated survey of library videos was published relatively recently by Islam and Porter (2008). Here we will review existing online library videos to determine what form they have taken, and secondly we will examine the underlying reasons why videos in general are potentially an effective medium for online instruction and developing information literacy, with special reference to memory and learning.…”

“…Oehrli et al , 2011; Birch et al , 2010; Small, 2010). On the other hand, some videos, especially those with a dramatic element (“movies”), are normally more general in their purpose, and seek to illustrate the basic principles of using the library or locating information (Islam and Porter, 2008; Mizrachi and Bedoya, 2007). In addition to locating information, video can to some extent be employed to demonstrate ways of using that information effectively.…”

Üniversite Kütüphanelerinin YouTube Videolarının Tanıtım ve Pazarlama Yönünden Analizi

“…Bu alanda yazılan makaleler incelendiğinde; kütüphane videolarının yararları ve uzaktan eğitimdeki katkısı (Islam ve Porter, 2008;Grove, 2021), kütüphane video eğitimlerinin nasıl üretildiği (Tewell, 2010;Little, 2011;Cho, 2013;Martin, N. ve Martin, R. 2015;King, 2018b;Sandy, Krishnamurthy ve Rau, 2009;Saines, 2011), video materyallerinin sınıflandırılması (Popova, 2020), kütüphane videolarının etkinliklerinin ölçümü (Dalal ve Lackie, 2014;Wakiji ve Thomas, 1997) ve etkinliklerini artırmak için öğretim üyelerinden destek alınması (Camacho, 2018) konularının incelenmiş olduğu tespit edilebilir. Bazı makalelerde ise videoların etkileşim ve iletişim için (Zhao ve Mawhinney, 2020;Saines, 2011) yararlarının ele alındığı görülmektedir.…”

“…Videoların, kütüphane ve kullanıcı iş birliği için kullanılmasını (Martin, 2012;Camacho, 2018;Mizrachi ve Bedoya, 2007;Dunne, 2012) öneren makaleler de bulunmaktadır. Videolarda Canan Ergün eğlence unsurunun kütüphaneyi kullanmanın veya bilgiyi bulmanın etkili olacağını belirten (Thornton ve Kaya, 2013;Islam ve Porter, 2008;Mizrachi ve Bedoya, 2007) araştırmalar da tespit edilmiştir.…”