Lots of Progress Made... Lots More Needed!

Once again, it's been a long time since the last post... but tonnes has happened.

We've been given the green light for the funding of our plasma display screen in the Health Services Library - my only concern now is whether we're able to have it installed where I want it. Our original idea for its location was near the Loans and Enquiry Desks - but health and safety concerns (the bottom of the screen would be quite low, and tall people could easily have banged their head on it - ouch!) meant that suggestion got scratched.

What we're looking at now is having it mounted from the ceiling, facing you as you come into the library. For visibility, that's an excellent solution - I can't think of a better place to have it at all! But I'm just hoping that when it comes to the crunch, it is actually able to be installed in the ceiling (it sounds odd, but because of the ceiling covering, we can't see the ceiling itself to work out if it's structurally strong enough for the job).

That's for the longer term (we're looking to the summer for the installation)... but in the meantime, rather out of the blue, I've been given access to the School of Medicine's plasma screen in the Health Services Library. Result!

It's been there for far too long now, with few - if any - updates... and nobody ever looks at it. It's not helped by the fact that it's not really in a very good position at all. Through the grapevine, I'd heard that the IT person I knew in the School of Medicine had been co-opted into iSolutions, and had been given responsibility for the University's plasma screens.

I emailed him for some advice about the plasma screen displays, and he said "Why don't you have this username and password for the SoM screen in the library, and try it out for yourself?". I am a self-confessed geek, and I love playing with new techie toys... it was as much as I could do not to bounce around the office like a powerball on speed, lol!

So I've been having a play with that, learning how to use the software (Xibo) and what's the most effective way to put up the information that we want. It's been very interesting and informative - but I'm still a long way from feeling that I've got it absolutely nailed. For one thing, a lot of what I want to put on display has quite a lot of content... but that's not really suitable for a display screen.

Perhaps this is obvious to everyone else, but what works best on the display screen is advertisement-like single-page stories. Text needs to be really big, obvious and graphic-intensive.

My learning curve just got a whole lot steeper...

Use of Imagery

Unless we get some really good, dedicated plasma-screen-display software given to us when the screen is installed, then the obvious tool to use for the screen is PowerPoint.

But with PowerPoint comes PowerPoint-Slide-Design-Fatigue - there are only a limited number of PowerPoint slide designs, and by now everyone's seen almost all of them countless times. The only impact on your audience that using a standard PPT slide design will have is "Oh, he's using that design. How dull."

The solution? Photographs.

No, not snapshots of the library - I'm talking about professional-looking images that really catch the eye. Ones that are appropriate for the environment, and which are interesting to look at. And (and here's the trick) ones that can be used legally - using good-looking pictures from a quick Google Images search without checking their copyright status is out of the question.

I'll be mainly using two sources:

• Photographs in Microsoft clip art
• Creative Commons content on Flikr

What's more, I'll be using them for two different puposes:

• Background images for text
• "Spacer" images - no text, just the image, used to separate slides with content

The "spacer" images may seem superfluous to some, but to my mind they are very important. They break up the presentation so that it's not just a continuous stream of text, and they provide something that might just catch someone's interest and get them watching the screen.

Furthermore, whilst I intend to use images that are relevant to health and medicine, I fully intend to also use images that are not directly relevant, but which I think look nice (for want of a better word) or interesting. Of course, what makes for a "nice" or interesting image is an entirely subjective judgement on my part - c'est la vie.

Things Aren't As Quiet As They Seem...

It's been quite a while since I last posted news about the plasma screen display idea, for a couple of good reasons:

• The autumn term is always extremely busy, so side projects tend to take a bit of a back seat (most of last term was consumed with developing two half-day training courses on using Reference Manager)
• As we didn't have the plasma screen, there was no point in dedicating significant time to a project with no immediate likelihood of having a positive outcome

That's not to say that I spent no time whatsoever thinking about this - in fact, quite the opposite. I'm convinced that if we can implement a plasma screen display in the way that I want, it will be a really effective tool (okay, so that may come across as a little arrogant, I'll admit!).

As a result, the idea is always in the back of my mind and whenever I have a moment I try thinking of how I can make the display as effective as possible, and get it to do the things that I want it to.

This has led to three key developments in the past few months:

• Use of imagery on the slides
• Insertion of live web pages and tweets in slides
• Repurposing of relevant external content

I'll write separate posts to discuss each of those in more detail shortly (otherwise this post would end up looking more like a dissertation than a blog post!).

In the meantime, I might as well reveal one final piece of news that has some relevance to this whole idea... we've been given the money to go ahead and get the plasma screen!

I'll allow myself a small smile to celebrate this step forward - but I'm not going to get too excited until I see the screen in place, running the presentation (at this stage I'm not counting a single chicken).

Promotional Campaign

One of the things I'm adamant about is that it's not really worth the investment of time and effort if very few people are going to pay attention - so promoting my tweets is going to be important.

If we ever do get our plasma screen then it will have an obvious and immediate benefit - but I want the impact to go a little further.

For instance, our medical faculty has several plasma screens (including one in the library) which don't really get updated - I'm trying to see if they'll insert my Twitter feed onto their screens.

I'm now including a link to my feed on all of my work emails, which will get it a little bit of exposure to people who are already on Twitter.

I'll be giving a lecture to all of our Year 3 medical students in a few weeks - I'll try and drop a mention of it into the presentation somehow - and I may well make the link visible at some point in training sessions I run throughout the next academic year.

Finally, I want to use it as just one part of the outreach programme the library wants to run with clinical teams in the hospital - which will have the added benefit that I can tailor it to suit the needs and interests of any teams that we work with.

Ahhh, it all sounds so easy ;o)

What to Tweet?

Deciding exactly what to Tweet is going to be an interesting challenge. Some of it is obvious, of course - news and info about the library for starters. Relevant news from the medical faculty, university and hospital - let's put a big tick right there.

But that in itself isn't going to be enough to keep the feed interesting and alive. And in any case, I want this to promote thinking about evidence based medicine in the minds of students and staff. So in addition to the absolute essentials of library, uni and hospital news, here's what I think I'll add:

• Relevant health news from the media.
• Appraisals of media heath news from the Behind the Headlines team.
• Discussions about EBM-related topics from people like Ben Goldacre, the CEBM, Journal Watch and the like.

In some ways, not having the plasma screen up and running will be a help - since it's allowing me to start tweeting from my EBM account knowing that actually not that many people are seeing it at the moment. I can find my "voice", get my pitch right and work out what I should and should not include whilst I have a relatively low profile.

Then, once I start promoting it to my intended audience and (hopefully!) start to get a reasonable number of followers I'll be more confident of having the pitch of my tweets about right.

Twitter & the Plasma Screen

Long before I decided to do the EBM Twitter feed, I was on Twitter in a social context - but clearly it would be inappropriate for me to mix my personal and professional Twitter personas, especially if I was going to post tweets onto a plasma screen.

Having two Twitter accounts might have been a real pain to manage - but it's actually very easy, thanks to TweekDeck. I can use that to monitor all the Twitter accounts I'm following, either through my social or professional account, and post items to either of my feeds (or to my Facebook account).

It's also made me realise the best way to manage my EBM Twitter feed and the plasma display: I'll have my publicly viewable EBM Twitter feed, and another (yes, a third!) Twitter account specifically for the plasma display.

Using TweetDeck I can then push tweets through to the main Twitter feed and/or to the plasma screen as I see fit - without tying myself up in knots and getting completely confused :)

The EBM Twitter Idea

We recently had the opportunity to have a huge plasma screen installed in the library, which we could use to post news and information to our users. I've seen these things before and it was obvious that for it not to be a huge waste of money it had to be:

• Positioned somewhere where people would see it and read it (you'd think that would be obvious to anyone installing this kind of thing... if only!)
• Contain interesting stuff that was updated regularly - if you saw exactly the same content a month on, then you've got a turkey on your hands... but if you could come back the next day, or even a few hours/minutes later and see something different? Well, then you've got something that people will actually look at

So the question was how could we update it? Sure, PowerPoint will do the job, but it's not exactly exciting, and you have to edit the file each time you want to make an alteration. No, what we really want is to embed an RSS feed or something similar...

...and that's when I thought about Twitter.

Here's the idea:

• In amongst the PowerPoint-style, image-intensive banner ads how about having a live stream of news
• Push it via Twitter and you've got an easy way of populating it with brief bits of news
• You want the display screen to have lots of fresh news - much like you would a Twitter feed: it's a natural fit!

But it still left the problem of what to post - dull library news about the new book we've just bought won't cut it. Stuff about evidence based medicine, research, medicine in the media however... well, that might just be the ticket. Hey, if it works for Ben Goldacre, why not for us, too?

Even better, for some while we've been looking to get more involved with the clinical teams in the hospital - supporting them more directly with literature searches, document supply and - importantly - things like critical appraisal. Maybe we could use this as a mechanism of prompting clinical staff to think more regularly about searching the literature more effectively, and the use & appraisal of evidence.

As Hannibal would say: "I love it when a plan comes together".



(Oh, I should say that we didn't get the plasma screen (maybe next year?), but now I've got the idea I'm going to get it up and running anyway.)