“Why do so few organisations live-stream their events?”

I came across two interesting posts in my Facebook stream earlier today. In the first post John Popham, a digital storyteller posed the question“why do so few organisations live-stream their events?” As illustrated, John provided an accompanying image which illustrated how live-streaming can nowadays be carried out using a smartphone which many of us will now carry.

Back in March 2011 I asked a similar question. In a post about a Seminar on “Mobile Technologies: Why Library Staff Should be Interested” which I published shortly after giving the seminar to University of Bath library staff I explained how:

As well as describing how I use mobile devices (in particular the iPod Touch) the seminar also provided an ideal opportunity to demonstrate various uses of mobile technologies. This included:

• A live video stream of the talk published on Bambuser (taken using Rocketfish Webcam on an Apple Macbook)
• Live streaming of the slides using the broadcast feature introduced in Microsoft Powerpoint 2010.

I received the following feedback on the live video stream:

• 11:26  anonymous: Hi Brian!  Bir jerky on the video, audio is fine. :)
• 11:26  working pretty well brian: Yeah a bit jerky now
• 11:27  itsme: video jerky audio good
• 11:27  lescarr: Quality of video & audio very good. It does halt sometimes.
• 11:27  mhawksey: audio is great, vid a bit jerky cam keeps refocusing
• 11:29  Jo Alcock: Audio OK – video a bit jerky (but my connection isn’t very good here)
• 11:30  Jo Alcock: Started watching it on iPad (through Twitter app), works well but moved to desktop now to enable chat
• 11:30  Nicola: As tweeted: Audio good, video patchy at first but now pretty good – bit blurry but very much what you’d expect from a phone and v. acceptable #bathlib
• 11:33  working pretty well brian: Video fairly patchy – Mahendra, Audio ok

In addition Ann Priestly (@annindk) an information professional currently working in Denmark) commented:

Watched yr seminar over lunch – thanks! Quality just fine, thinking ROI must be good for these quick sessions

It was interesting to note how Ann had picked up on the return on investment benefits which can be gained from such informal approaches to sharing talks with a wider audience, beyond those who are physically present. Such recordings of talks will enable local staff who weren’t able to be present to be able to view talks which have been recorded using simple mobile technologies. In addition, there are typically no additional costs for sharing such recordings with others.  A great ROI, especially for those who wish to promote open educational practices. And as academic librarians are likely to be involved in promoting the benefits of use of open access research publications it would seem to be a natural extension to promote the benefits of other aspects of openness.

What about sharing screencasts?

I mentioned that I came across two interesting updates in my Facebook stream this morning. In the second update Guus van den Brekel provided “A few useful tips on the use of Google Scholar for work or study in a short video” with a link to an accompanying video recording hosted on YouTube. The video was a screencast lasting 3 minutes 44 seconds which showed Guus demonstrating some of the benefits of Google Scholar. Although I make use of Google Scholar I admit that I learnt something from this, so I am grateful for Guus sharing this not only with staff and students at his host institution, the University Medical Center Groningen, but for making it freely available to everyone and, specifically, sharing it with his Facebook friends. In addition to viewing the video on YouTube, it is also embedded below.

What are the barriers?

What are the answers to the question John Popham posed: “why do so few organisations live-stream their events?” And to broaden the questions slightly: “why don’t more institutions provide screencasts about use of popular services which are freely available to everyone?”

Some possible reasons include:

•  The costs of providing live streaming, video recordings and screencasts.
• Concerns over the legal implications of publishing multimedia resources (e.g. privacy, data protection, etc.)
• Concerns over potential copyright infringements (i.e. including of copyrighted user interfaces)
• Concerns over being seen to make mistakes, which may be accepted in real-life presentations.
• A belief that institutions should be making money from their intellectual activities.
• A feeling that there are others who could make better multimedia resources.
• A concern that multimedia resources which are created may not be used.
• It’s not our job!

What other barriers may there be? Feel free to add a comment  to this post or participate in the poll given at the bottom of this post.

Is ILI providing opportunities for sharing multimedia resources?

Coincidentally I have just received an email related to next week’s ILI 2014 conference. The email describes the ‘ILI App – Your conference app with your conference content’. The email goes on to invite ILI participants to submit Multimedia summaries of work which is relevant to the ILI conference:

Just send or bring along some information you think would be relevant to any of the ILI 2014 conference tracks. This may take the form of something you have written, an image or two, or perhaps a short video or audio file which relates to your work. Email it to us or visit us at the ‘ILI app’ tabletop in the Sponsor Showcase. If you give us a title and a brief description of what you did and the impact it had (100-150 words max), plus whatever visual or audio content you want to share – we will add it into the app. Once we have uploaded it, your contribution and that of all your peers, will be shared in real time to the app.

Perhaps this may provide an opportunity to create a multimedia resource. And, if you’re not attending ILI 2014, why not share it with your peers, as an open resource for other librarians?

View Twitter conversations and metrics using: [Topsy] – [bit.ly]