I’ve always been interested in film and photography as art forms, but never before tried to make something of my own. This was the most fun and thought-provoking project I’ve done in library school, allowing me to marry the intellectual content with indulging my love of tools. I love gadgets and tools; I paid $100 at Williams-Sonoma for a classic chrome citrus juicer, I have a closet full of DIY hand and power tools and I spent many hours this semester playing with video and audio tools. We did most of our collaboration on our wiki, but we did have one meeting to look at some rough cuts and storyboard the rest of narrative where Mary had to yell “Hey, we’re still here!” after I spent 45 minutes trying to get an photo mash-up to work the way I wanted it. As Mary mentioned, we here not able to pass the uncompiled video around for editing, so I happily did the editing and futzed around with the sound levels, trying to equalize them between the clips.
I think the collaborative process worked well for us and using various technologies and tools to create content led us to revise our thinking on the Deweyless library. It was very enlightening to feel the pedagogical effects the process. At the beginning, we all expressed a degree of skepticism on the concept of the Deweyless library. It was serendipity that Martha and I were able to attend the PLA session on our topic just as we were finishing the video and hear about the results in the 9 months the Perry branch has been open. We hadn’t been able to find any followup published since the opening, so we were concerned. The presentation was wonderful and Marshall Shore graciously let us interview him on film afterwards.
Thanks, Mary and Martha, for makng our last group project of library school such a high point!
