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).