Techno Thursday: Digital Storytelling for Libraries

This week’s assignment in my Technology class focused on Digital Storytelling, which is a video created by a library or librarian for marketing or advocacy purposes.  We were placed into groups and tasked with creating a 3-4 minute long video that incorporated images, narration, and music.

My Technology class is a hybrid course, which means we meet in person once a month.  During last night’s April meet-up, we were given time to create our videos. My group members and I traded a few emails over the past week because we wanted to be able to hit the ground running when we met face-to-face.  We also did some brainstorming via Google Docs, specifically about what age groups we work with, programs we have done, and ideas we had for our video. We ultimately decided on a video that promoted diverse books for young children, elementary students, and teens.  Each of us selected two books and wrote a book talk for each book.

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When it was time for us to get into our groups, my group retreated to a little techno nook that is the Secret Garden of the School of Information Science (SOIS) program at Dominican University.  I had no idea that this room of technological goodness existed until one of my group members suggested that we go in there to work on our project. One of my group members hooked up her Macbook to the two large monitors in the SOIS computer lab to screencast her computer, which enabled us all to see our project and offer suggestions.  This assignment also provided me with an introduction to iMovie. I liked how iMovie allowed us to record our narration and adjusted the volume of our narrator when we added background music. It was like techno magic!

I really enjoyed putting together this project and felt that my group collaborated well.  We each contributed to the final product: one of my group members is a total whiz at iMovie and made our video look slick, the other group member had great suggestions for edits to the video, and I was able to come up with an introduction and conclusion for our video using some pieces from my Social Justice In the Stacks webpage.  I am pretty proud of what we created.

I think that Digital Storytelling can be a really fantastic marketing tool for libraries.  I am on the planning committees for two of my library’s biggest annual celebrations - Harry Potter Day and Star Wars Day.  I think that highlighting some of the incredible photos taken at last year’s events would be a really great marketing tool for promoting both celebrations this year.  I also think that this could be used to create videos on our library webpage to promote new books, our kid favorites section, and even share some early literacy tips! As a digital consumer, I know that I gravitate toward videos and images and I am certain that the customers my library serves function similarly.  Short videos are a great way to promote library programming and materials.