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...
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