Jazzin' Up Atriuum!

*Today's post is by Meg Brooke, NBCT. Meg is one of the school librarians at Shades Valley/JCIB High School.


Atriuum has paved the way for us to have a great web tool to help with all of
our day to day library business. It also allows room for color and creativity in
our homepage appearance and visual searches that I’m sure everyone is using.
Something different that we’re trying this year is to add videos of author talks
or book trailers of some of our books so that students can click and perhaps be
more enticed to read that book! In our freshman studies we demonstrated how
the students could look at the videos when we showed them how to use Atriuum,
and there was a huge demand for the books with videos! The downside is that
finding the videos can be a time-consuming endeavor, and most of us just don’t
have that time. This project might be something you could get your student
assistants to work on, or maybe you have parent volunteers who could help. If
you have parents who want to help but can’t due to conflicts with their work,
perhaps this would be a project they’d want to tackle at home! You could always
have a list of books and publishers ready for anyone wanting to help with the
library program!

Getting Started:

We began our searching with the publisher's or the book's website. Scholastic
was a publisher that had some good videos. Googling is also an option,
but many of these will lead to youtube videos which can’t be seen on our
servers. You can get around this, however, by downloading this tool: http://
youtubedownload.altervista.org. Next, upload the video to Teacher or School
Tube or your website and have Atriuum link to it from the unblocked source now.
I know……lots of steps AND time! This is a project for any down times (in a blue
moon!) or for helpers in the library to do.

*By the way, we may not be able to find videos, but we can certainly make our own, post to our websites, and link from there.  This would be a fun and educational library activity, and the library catalog would probably be viewed more than ever!

You’re close to the end now and the easy part as you’ll just have to enter the
URL and a note. It’s on the Add Item: Bibliographic Record page after Core and
Analytics and will say Media. You’ll just add the URL and a note. For the note we
usually write something like this: Click here to see author talk about book or Click
here to learn about the book. See below:

Try this if you haven’t already, and be prepared for the books to become instant
successes!

P.S.We’ve only just begun and aren’t experts on time management OR having
super success with videos. If you have suggestions, let’s blog about them and
help each other!