Thing 8: Infographics

We touched upon infographics two years ago when we were asked to create one using Easel.ly.  I remember disliking it because in spite of its name I found this tool anything but easy to use.  I was a bit apprehensive having to tackle the subject again but it turns out my fears were unfounded!  I experimented with both Piktochart and Canva and found them super-easy to use.  I ultimately went with Canva because it had a much greater range of free templates to choose from.

I initially thought about turning a report which I prepared a few years ago into an infographic but this didn't work out.  The report was too long and had too many graphs in it, and squeezing it all into an infographic would have resulted in a cluttered mess.  Having said that, I think an infographic would be a great way to make a report or statistical data more digestible.  It would also be a great tool for providing step-by-step instructions for just about anything, or for presenting the key points of a difficult topic in an easy to absorb format.

Having discarded the idea of turning a report into an infographic, I had a moment of panic.  I am not the greatest in the world to come up with random ideas for projects and having wasted the best part of four months meditating on Thing 7 I couldn't afford to repeat that experience.  I therefore decided to go for something very simple and devised an infographic on the benefits of print books, the idea behind it being an attempt to entice people to pick up a real book instead of an e-one.  I found a template that suited the purpose nicely and found it very easy to manipulate.

As with WordPress in Thing 7, the one drawback of the free version of Canva is that the extent to which you can manipulate the template is quite limited.  For instance, I wanted to have the last two lines of the infographic in bold but this was not possible because the template was designed with non-bold text in this area and that was non-negotiable.  Another disappointment of Canva was that while there are plenty of brilliant images to choose from, the range of free ones is so limited as to be almost useless.  In order to make the most of this tool one would need to upgrade from the free version to Pro, or to pay a dollar per image which let's face it isn't a whole hill of beans!  However, Canva does allow you to upload your own images, either by saving them from a file or simply by dragging them across from your desktop, and there are plenty of good free clip-art images available in image banks such as Pixabay (as we learnt in Thing 3!).

This Thing has introduced me to a new way of conveying information and I found it a really enjoyable experience.  Here is the infographic I prepared:

Thing 7: Online Exhibitions

Well!  That only took four months...

I have mixed feelings about this Thing.  On the one hand, I was really keen on it because knowing how to create an online exhibition opens up an entirely new world of visual communication and with this skill the possibilities for promoting and showcasing archival material are almost endless.  On the other, I feel it was too much work for the confines of this course.  I had the advantage of having done a WordPress course a couple of years previously but even with that under my belt, scanning the images, writing up the text and then building and populating the website took me a solid eight or nine hours to complete.

Initially, I also had trouble understanding what exactly we were asked to do.  While I really enjoyed reading the blog for Thing 7 and learnt an awful lot from it, I found the instructions for the task given to us a bit vague.  Recreate a brochure?  Reimagine the material in different contexts?  It didn't really make sense.  I tried checking how other course participants had tackled it but very few of them had ventured into the realm of Thing 7 (can't really blame them!), and those who had seemed as confused as I was.  At least that was a relief!

Once it dawned on me that what we were really asked to do was to create an online exhibition I froze altogether.  I hadn't a bat's notion as to what kind it should be, and it took me a full three months of dithering before I came up with a suitable idea.  This I readily admit was my own fault and nothing to do with the merits or otherwise of Thing 7!



Just finished Thing 7...
Image by Jessica Cross, Creative Commons Licence 2.0



What I finally decided to do was to bring together and showcase the collections in our archive which relate to the First World War, Irish War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War.  There are nine of these altogether and I felt that the best way to present them was to give a separate page to each one.  It sounds like a lot of work, but it wasn't really.  For the text bit I simply extracted paragraphs from the existing catalogues, and as most of these collections have been fully or partially digitized I initially only needed to source and scan five images.  However some of the images did not look right or were the wrong shape, so it took a bit of toing and froing to come up with the final set of illustrations.

For the online service I went for WordPress for the simple reason that I half knew how to use it.  I had a very clear idea in my mind on the layout I wanted and was thrilled to find that WordPress had a free template, called Twenty Fifteen, which exactly matched it.  It was so good in fact that it required very little customising - all I needed to do was to change the background colour and remove some of the built-in widgets which I didn't feel I needed.  Uploading the images was easy, and the text I had prepared I could simply add by cutting and pasting.  I did come across some oddities though.  I nearly lost the plot trying to centre the image captions, which looked fine on the post editor but were always left aligned in the preview.  I wasted nearly half an hour ranting and raving until I discovered that the Twenty Fifteen theme has been designed to allow left aligned captions only.  What a waste of sweat that was.  I also nearly lost the will to live trying to get rid of the 'leave a comment' bubble which appears in the footer of the homepage.  I finally accepted that I could either jump off a cliff or just get used to the bubble so there it sits and bugs me.

The free version of WordPress is a great way for beginners to start learning about creating a website but it does have its limitations.  For example, there are only 100 themes to choose from, you cannot add any plug-ins, and you will have to put up with ads on your website which I personally find disagreeable.  The free version also limits what you can do with templates.  The Twenty Fifteen template for instance only had five colour palettes to choose from, and these in turn could only be manipulated by changing the background colour.  However, if you are happy with a simple and straightforward website, this isn't necessarily an impediment - I frankly am much happier choosing one theme out of a hundred than one out of several thousands!

So that was my experience in a nutshell, and here is a link to the result.

Thing 3: Image Banks

And we're off again!  Thrilled to start a new course - thanks and congratulations to course organisers.

For the Image Banks thing, I decided to take a closer look at Pixabay.  I have never used this image bank before, or frankly even heard of it so I was curious to see how it works and how it compares with Google Images and Flickr.

My first impression was - wow!  This site is a goldmine for really good, vibrant contemporary images and the site is very easy to use.  You can browse by category or do a keyword search and then define your search by orientation, size, colour and whether you are looking for a photograph, drawing, vector graphic or a video (this last one blew my mind altogether!).  I tried lots of different keywords and combinations of keywords and was really impressed with the results.  I did find that there is a certain sameness to images in some categories but that is perhaps unavoidable.

Downloading an image couldn't be easier - just click on the image you want, then click 'download' and you're good to go.  If you are not a registered user you are asked to type in a captcha before you get your image but that's no big deal.  I really like the fact that one can freely use this image bank without having to sign up.

Image by Ohurtsov, Creative Commons Licence CC0 

One thing that disappointed me a little about Pixabay is that it does not contain any old material - early photographs, postcards and suchlike - or if it does I couldn't find it.  In that respect Flickr and Google Images are better.

For those who are interested, below are a few other websites which will allow you to download and use images for non-commercial purposes as long as you acknowledge the original source.  Make sure however to check the copyright status of each item before you use it because not all of them are free from copyright.

Imperial War Museum
National Portrait Gallery, London
US National Library of Medicine's Digital Collections (contains some images to which copyright may apply)
Library of Congress Digital Collections (as above)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (look out for the CC0 icon for images which are free to use)

Thing 23: Making it All Work Together

Social media management tools sound like a brilliant idea for those who have a lot of accounts to manage in a professional capacity.  As social media management is not part of my job description and I only have a few personal accounts which I rarely use I don't think I'll be needing such tools just yet.   However I am glad to know they exist because we live in an ever-changing world in which one can never say never!

Having reached the end of the course my relationship with social media remains ambiguous.  I can see the benefits it can bring in an increasingly competitive world where libraries and archives struggle for their voices to be heard among thousands of others shouting for attention.  It is a fantastic avenue for promoting an event or a project and for spreading information quickly and effectively. However, it is also an incredibly time consuming activity and requires a far greater commitment than I personally would be prepared to give.  There is also a fine but crucial line between getting a message across and shouting for the sake of shouting,  which much of social media seems to comprise.

I would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to the team who put this course together. It has been a massive learning curve and has kept me firmly out of my comfort zone for the past five months which is always a good thing!  I am still not a great fan of social media but I have a much better understanding of how it works and what it can and cannot do.  I now know what people mean when they talk about Instagram or Twitter or Pinterest and this is a huge step forward.  I have loved reading the blogs of other participants and have been truly impressed by the way people have embraced social media at work.  Some of the Things I've hated, other's I've loved but not one has left me indifferent!  I particularly enjoyed the video and podcasts, and I am actually going to miss writing a blog!  Thank you each and every one of you, and good luck with all your future endeavours.

Image: Social Media Explained by birgerking licensed under CC BY 2.0

Thing 22: Mobile Things

This is going to be my shortest blog ever.  I don't have an iPhone, iPad, smartphone, tablet or any other mobile device so I cannot work on Options 1 or 2.  As regards Option 3, I really, really don't mean to be a smart aleck but if one doesn't own a mobile device what possible use would the 23 Mobile Things course be as it presumes that participants have one?  For anyone who does have a mobile device but does not know how to tap into its social media potential I am sure the course would be a brilliant idea.

Beacon intrigues me!  The idea of a library notifying patrons of overdue books and special events seems like a great idea although I am somewhat weary of the notion of having a mobile device pinging and bleeping as you walk about town bombarding you with information, advertisements and special offers at every shop you pass.  No thanks to that!

I appreciate that mobile devices can be an incredibly versatile tool for accessing and disseminating information however I also feel that they are invasive, pervasive and distracting. It has always baffled me that what goes on in your smartphone seems to be way more interesting than what goes on around you in real life. Perhaps I need to buy one to understand...

Image source: "Creative Commons C & C Cartoon: Passing the Buck" by CA Technologies licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Thing 21: Creating Infographics

Infographics was a completely new concept for me, or so I thought.  Then I realized  that I am in fact familiar with them, only where I work we tend to call them posters.  It also struck me as I was reading through the course notes that we are actually surrounded by infographics - think traffic signs, for example.

Infographics

Infographs seem like a great way of packaging and disseminating information in an easy to grasp format.  It seems to be particularly well suited to making statistics more palatable and explaining hierarchical systems but I would imagine that it can be applied to almost anything.

I converted our reading room rules into an infograph using Easel.ly and here's the (puny) result:
Reading Room Rules.  I confess I found this web tool easy by name but not by nature!  It took me absolutely forever to figure out that background colours, shapes and text boxes are added or changed simply by clicking on what you want and dragging it onto the canvas - duh!  Also, the free version is quite limited in what it can do.  One thing that really frustrated me was that the tool does not allow you to centre or align images at the press of a button.  You can align text within a text box easily enough but if you want the centre the text box itself you have to make an educated guess.  There is a grid that can be activated  which helps a little but it isn't properly aligned with the poster so you still end up more or less guessing.  Also, if you sign up for this web tool, be prepared to be inundated with emails of handy tips and whatnot!

As useful as infographs are, they are incredibly fiddly and time consuming to create.  You'd really want to be a graphic artist to make full use of them.  This, coupled with the fact that the shelf-life of an infograph is probably quite short - today's news is tomorrow's history - leads me to query their applicability to the day to day activities of a library or an archive.

Image: "Creative Commons Great Britain Road Signs" by Ian Britton licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Thing 20: Presentations

I have been using PowerPoint for years and find it a brilliant tool for presentations.  Having said that, I admit that it's not the easiest software to use, particularly if you want to add music or a narrative, or if you want to make a timed presentation in which slides change automatically rather than at the press of a button.  Also, because of the many design and special effects options PowerPoint offers, it's easy to get carried away and create an all-flashing, all-swivelling presentation in which the message gets completely lost!

The most recent PowerPoint presentation I created was for a group of students who were studying to become curators of arts events and wanted to learn how to manage collections of archival nature with limited resources.  This was an awfully interesting challenge as I really had to go back to basics and think simple.  I decided to focus on three different media: paper, photographs and audio-visual recordings.  I included a brief overview of each media, followed by basic handling rules and storage ideas that did not require complex solutions such as climate control or acid-free containers.

Once I had worked out the topics and the general "plot" of the presentation, I began putting it together in PowerPoint.  My personal experience is that people are much more drawn to pictures than they are to text so I tried to come up with catchy, colourful illustrations.  The images also acted as cues for me so that I didn't need a thick wad of notes when giving the presentation.  I interspersed photographs with text but kept the text slides as light as possible, with no more than three or four bullet-pointed lines per slide.  I decided to go for a manual rather than automated slide show which turned out to be a good choice as the course participants were very engaged and asked lots of questions throughout the presentation.

I'm not an expert on using PowerPoint but I have found the following rules of thumb helpful:

• Use images rather than text slides
• If you need to use text, keep it as short and concise as possible.  Nobody wants to read through lines and lines of small print on the screen
• Leave the text slides on for a bit longer to allow people to copy the information if they wish to do so.  Alternatively, provide participants with paper copies of the presentation
• People get tired of looking at the same image for minutes on end so the more images the presentation contains the better - within reason of course!  Ideally, a photographic slide should not stay up for more than half a minute or so.

I was interested in learning about Prezi and Google Slides and would be very keen to experiment with both.  I agree that their templates look more streamlined and contemporary than those of PowerPoint, although if design is your thing it won't be difficult to make PowerPoint look contemporary too.

Image source: "Creative Commons Your Presentation was Confusing and Unpersuasive" by bsoist licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.