Our Piece Of Artwork And The Light At The End Of The Tunnel - 10/31/07

Pam and I received the heavier paper today from Renee, our graphics person, to print out our brochure. We used our color printer and the PDF file we had saved of the brochure to make copies for ourselves, 5 copies to attach to our display board and a copy each for John Taube, our director, Lisa McKenney, our supervisor, and Jennifer Howell, the training coordinator for Western Maryland Public Libraries. Jennifer and John will be accompanying us on our trip to Columbia for the presentation. In addition, we made copies for our personnel files and sent them to our supervisor as well.

Then we returned to evaluating more resources ...

Brochure Is Finalized!!! - October 30, 2007

Renee sent Nora an e-mail with a better picture of the logo for us to use on the brochure. She also sent a screen shot from our blog. We decided to use both. We saved the information and printed the brochure. It will look even better once we print it on the heavier paper. Lisa sent an e-mail to us this morning telling us she had converted our brochure to a pdf file.

We printed out a copy of the screen shot from our blog to use on our display board.
We will be working on our display board tomorrow.

And we are continuing to work on our resources as usual. That's all for today.

Brochure Progress!

We met today with Renee Mason, the graphics person for the library system. (She is a part-time employee who does work for the whole library system.) We wanted her input on the colors and layout of our brochure. She provided a few suggestions, mostly regarding placement of text and colors which we are going to try to work on this evening. Renee brought several samples of paper with her for the brochure but thinks we should stick with a white background, of which she may have some heavier stock, based on the colors we have chosen. Then we will finish our work of art, at least brochurewise.

This evening we have a substitute coming in again so that Pam and I can work on the brochure and perhaps get some of the resources done. We are coming down the home stretch with them. We can't wait to say "I am finished my resources!"

We have decided that the last page of our brochure should include a thank you for our co-workers, who have gone above and beyond the call of duty in allowing us time to work on our LATI assignments and projects.

Also, we are having our Halloween celebration here tomorrow with the staff dressing up in costumes and having lunch brought in, so we decided that maybe we can have our photo taken together early in the morning, and then we will add that to one of the brochure pages also.

Treading Water and Keeping Up! - 10/25/07

Yesterday, made some progress on the brochure. Pam is on vacation the rest of the week, but since we worked on the draft of the text for the brochure, I decided to try to see if it would all fit in the template we had chosen.

I entered all of the text that we had decided on, switched some of the colors that the template had originally, and added a photo to part of it.

Pam is getting her e-mail where she is staying, so I sent a copy on to her for her comment.

We still have one page that needs something, I am thinking a snapshot of our blog, and an updated photo of Pam and I when we are trying to look pretty and relaxed.

By coincidence received an e-mail from our graphics person who is stopping by Monday to give us some advice about the brochure. She has some colored paper up for grabs if anyone needs it. Pam and I had discussed copying the brochure on colored paper. I e-mailed the graphics person, and sent her a copy of the draft brochure. She is going to see what will fit with it, and bring samples of the paper to our meeting on Monday.

Today I sent an e-mail to our supervisor to add the blog address to the page we are using for our presentation.

That's it for today. More to come at a later date.

LATI Project - Display Board - 10/22/07

This evening we once again had a substitute so we could work on organizing our display board. We printed out several color photos that we will be using in our PhotoStory 3 presentation, and some of the photos we already have on our blog.

In addition, we drafted a paper copy of the layout of the display board. Tomorrow we are going to speak with a couple of the staff who have graphics experience to get their advice on the layout and color choices for the type.

While we were working this evening we began a list of questions for our supervisor that ranged from technical questions regarding software for the laptop we are bringing, to why we can't print the whole home page information. We called and left a message on her work phone asking if we could talk to her tomorrow, perhaps on speaker phone, so we can put those matters to rest.

We also marked our calendar to make sure we charged the laptop on November 7th so it would be all ready for the 8th. And we decided the date/s we would do our dress rehearsal.

In addition, we talked once again about getting substitutes or laying out designated days so that we could work on the brochure. We are going to try to do that for about an hour or so tomorrow morning, while we have our part-time person here work the desk.

That's it for now. At least we didn't get too giggly this evening, just enough to keep us going.

Final Editing of Camtasia & PhotoStory 3 - 10/19/07

Our supervisor, Lisa McKenney, came today to help us with our presentations. She had taken the Camtasia presentation that she and Pam worked on and edited it some, added a link to our website, and we previewed it together. It now has three parts and is narrated by Pam.

We should be able to launch the presentations from our web site link but want to save it in case something goes wrong.

Lisa showed us how to save our PhotoStory 3, so that we could use Web Media, and how to enlarge it so the whole screen has the photo for the presentation, and we saved it to our flash drive.

We tried to save the Camtasia to the flash drive but it didn't transfer properly so she is going to work on that and let us know what to do.

We also started printing some of the photos so that we could use them on our display board. Pam had saved the original photos on her desktop, so we printed them out using the color printer. They look great, even without photo paper.

Pam and I are starting a list of things we will need to bring with us so that we don't forget anything.

We are going to work on the presentation and photos again on Monday evening. Moving along!

PhotoStory 3 Down and Camtasia Almost Done! - 10/17/07

Wahoo! Yee Ha! Our PhotoStory 3 presentation is done! Our Camtasia presentation will be done on Friday, and both may be linked to our website according to our supervisor, Lisa McKenney. The final version of PhotoStory 3 was narrated this morning, after Story Hour and before the bookmobile arrived in the work room again. They are not noisy people but they would have been beep beeping.

Lisa will be coming back on Friday to help us out with the final editing of the Camtasia presentation.

On Monday we have a substitute coming in again in the evening so Pam and I can work on the brochure. We are now down to 2 less things to freak out about and can hopefully get the brochure done. We do have some ideas for our exhibit display board, so we can start laying that out as well.

That's all for today, thank goodness! On to more resources...

Camtasia & PhotoStory Day - 10/16/07

We survived. Our supervisor, Lisa McKenney, came to the rescue this morning. We discovered that despite what we thought, Nora's narration on the PhotoStory along with the slides was recorded last night. We just had the music volume up too high in the background, and we couldn't hear it. There are a few things to do to change it but we have saved our original just in case.

Lisa then assisted Pam with the Camtasia portion of the project: catalog searching. Pam sounded wonderful on the narration, although she didn't think so. Displayed you will see a photo of both Pam and Lisa. Pam could be a professional narrator! Maybe audio books are in her future!

On Friday Lisa will be coming back to our library to help us finish up the projects, and how we want to link them to our home page.

Now to get the final narration of the PhotoStory down. We need to choose a time when there are not many staff people in our workroom, so Friday may be the next time we can do it, otherwise we may end up recording little beep, beeps from the cataloger and the bookmobile as they are working. That's all for now. We feel better!

The Long Hard Learning Experience - 10/15/2007

Well, we once again had a substitute come in so we could work on adding narration to our PhotoStory. Well, we think we put the cart before the horse, because we added our music before we narrated it. And now we are having trouble adding the narration. We have been working on this for about 3 hours, and since it is now 8:00 pm, we have no technical help available. We have concluded that we will have to wait until tomorrow to get some advice because all the other lucky people are at home eating chocolate pie.

We had a brief mental breakdown about 7:15, when I first put the headset on, I felt like Madonna without the chestgear, and because we had a staff meeting at 8:00 this morning in our Frostburg branch, and are pretty well exhausted at this point, almost twelve hours later, we had a laughing till we cried episode that lasted about 10-15 minutes. I hope we didn't scare anyone but the substitute said it sounded like we were crying. One other day when we were working on this project and something similar happened, and the front desk staff person said it sounded like the Star Wars movie when the main characters are caught in the garbage dump, the walls are closing in, and then, just at the last minute, R2D2 stops the walls from squeezing them to death. The actors begin laughing deliriously, and C3PO says something along the lines listen to the poor things, like they are screaming to death, because he doesn't realize the walls have stopped and they are safe.

That's all for now - we are signing off for the evening.

Narrating PhotoStory III - 10/11/07

Whew! This part was harder than we thought.

We had a substitute here for 2 hours so that we could work on the narration script for our PhotoStory, but ended up working almost another hour on it after she left.

Pam and I thought that 5 seconds for each slide was plenty of time, especially if we want to keep it within our targeted time frame of 3.25 minutes.

After going through the slides and grouping similar ones together, we started writing and actually deleted 2 slides that we decided weren't necessary. We went over and over them, trying to convey the right information to new visitor's to our library.

We ended up with 23 narrative cards, and 39 slides. We have decided we don't need to chatter through every slide. Monday night is the next time that we will be able to work together on the project. We are going to fool with changing the timing and editing the script.

We are worried about completing our Camtasia presentation, which we plan on working on next Tuesday, with another 2 hours designated and also having the brochure ready on time. We are definitely feeling the squeeze even though we have had designated off desk, as well as other task time to do it.

I think our avatar is doing what we would like to do, pull our hair out!

Continuation of Editing of Photos - 10/09/07

Same time, same channel, we completed the editing of our photos using the contrast and color boost buttons in PhotoStory 3. We also after listening to many different types of music, decided on New Age, Smooth Sailing, Orchestra, and Dreamy setting for the background music. We also timed the presentation (3.25 minutes).

On Thursday, October 11th, we will begin the script for narrating the photos. Wahoo!

Editing of photos for PhotoStory III - 10/9/07

Our first day that we have a couple hours to work solely on the project. We plan on getting the photos in order and selecting the music to accompany them.

We reviewed our photos, and began deleting and moving photos to the right position in the presentation.

Pam and I decided that we needed more photos of the new book section, public computers, audio books, and adult book section. Nora took more photos.

Pam downloaded new photos on to computer to our PhotoStory presentation.

We found we had missed a few areas, and decided to take more photos again. Therefore, we took another shot of the circulation desk, the front entrance, DVD section, and our Friends of the Library sign. Now to put them in order again, and begin listening to music! We are trying to keep the whole presentation to about 3-5 minutes long.

One thing this has pointed out to us is how worn our circulation desk is, and how much we need bigger, more prominent signs for the library.

Our library is scheduled to hopefully be renovated fiscal year 2009 and this project and the photos have helped us to see what we would like to change.

Progress Continues

1. Our supervisor provided the software for the Camtasia presentation of our project.

2. We designated times in October and secured substitutes to work for us so we can devote time solely on our project.

3. We submitted our project information form to Laura after working on the description and 30 second commercial.

4. Nora and Pam created this blog for our LATI Project Journal.

5. We created an avatar and lost it and this posting at least twice. Always remember to save your work!!!

Our LATI Project Begins - August 29, 2007

1. PhotoStory 3 was downloaded on our computers.

2. We took digital photos of the inside and outside of our library building.

3. Pam reviewed other Maryland county public library sites for similar photostories.

4. Lisa McKenney, our supervisor, gave us an overview of PhotoStory.

5. Pam e-mailed Nora digital photos because her computer has speakers.