Doing It Yourself

…developing a self-guided audio tour for the Headington Library at Oxford Brookes

University

Directorate of Learning Resources

(click to advance from one slide to the next)

The audio tour was developed by the Information Skills Functional Group in

2008

Directorate of Learning Resources

Functional Groups

Web

Disability

Collection Development

SpecialCollections

Marketing

Information Skills

Research

Electronic Resources

The Library has various Functional Groups (a kind of permanent working party drawing on members from various teams). Here are a few of them…

Information Skills FG’s remit includes…

• Support guides for new Subject Librarians

• Drop-in subject-based info skills sessions

• Introduction to EndNote

• Library Lunchtimes

• How To…

Here’s the Web page for Library Training sessions, including several developed by the Information Skills Functional Group.

Traditional Tours…• over 350 tour slots in 3 weeks

• about 25 Library staff

• Usually over 1000 students toured

• Organising rotas

• Filling gaps

• Covering other services

• Providing subject inductions

• Third to half of slots no takers

• Intensive, not always efficient

Audio Tours…

• Self-guided

• MP3

• Flexible

• Cut down group tours

Resources

Media WorkshopBrookes’ Media WorkshopColleagues’ expertise

Free open-source software

DIY!

How We Did It

We needed a route round the library…

… and a script.(which had to be easy to follow and enable students to see what we wanted them to see)

Signs like these were put up round the Library at the various points where we wanted students to stand and look around them.

The audiotour tells students how to get from each Tour Point to the next.

Audio Tour

1

Recording the tour

• Voices…• Should we have one or

several?• Male or female?• What accents?• We went for a mixture of

voices who sounded clear but also welcoming.

Audacity’s home page: this is the open source software we used for recording.

Equipment:

• Some people advocate using a good quality (£60 plus) microphone for podcasting…

• Others find a £2.50 headset mike perfectly adequate for voice, and that’s what we used.

This is Audacity with a recorded sound file open. You can see that the graphical interface is fairly intuitive, with the big “Play”, “Record”, “Pause” and “Stop” buttons.

When the tour was ready we created a Web page for it…

What would we do differently?

??? - we don’t know till we get more feedback!

Try for more student participation, in piloting/testing the script and possibly even in recording it!

Try to find more time to spend on the recording and editing to improve the overall sound quality

What’s Next?...

Possibly a slideshow tour made up of photos and accompanying text, to be viewed from the Library Web site (like Wheatley Library’s, shown here)

We could turn the tour transcript into a written self-guiding tour booklet, with accompanying maps and pictures…

Podcast the How To… sessions:

• How to… find things in the Library• How to… read journal articles online• How to… access e-resources off-campus• How to… find journal articles for research

So go on,

Have a go!

at Doing It Yourself…

All images of Oxford Brookes University and of Oxford Brookes Web pages © Oxford Brookes University.

Image of Audacity home page © 2008 members of the Audacity development team.

Headset mike image © djdeals.com.

Other images sourced from Microsoft ClipArt, © Microsoft.