Could cartoons help students learn more about library services? Todd Vandenbark, Web Services Librarian at the University of Utah's health sciences library is trying to find out.
Vandenbark developed two animated videos about inter-library loans that he intends to post on the library services website. The videos are both around a minute long and are easy to share on Facebook and Twitter.
GoAnimate.com: Interlibrary Loan 1 by null
"I'm looking for new and creative ways to promote library services," said Vandenbark.
He recently conducted a study of student and faculty patrons and found that on average, they visit the library services page once a semester. He believes that having dynamic, eye-catching and informative content on the website will help drive more traffic and educate students.
"So many students come to me and say 'Gee, I wish I'd known about this in first year,' and they are just finding out about it in their third year of medical school," Vandenbark said. "We really want to help students with their assignments using high-quality information, rather than whatever comes up on Google."
Because Vandenbark used a free service called GoAnimate to make his videos, the speech is fairly robotic sounding, but the message gets across. Hopefully, these videos are just the first of many.