Another student-created video, this LibVid won the University of South Florida Tampa Library student video contest. Calming and mildly mesmerizing, it shows Frankenstein, Moby Dick, and other figures emerging from a claymation book. Complete with references to the library’s coffee shop, helpful resources, and great staff, this is a sweet advertisement for the library. We especially love the video’s original soundtrack.
This video is nominated for Best Animation.
Except you don’t need 3D glasses at home to get the full effect! This public service announcement from the Columbus Public Library in Columbus, Nebraska, manages to create a pretty neat-looking 3D pop-up book from digital still images and live footage. The musical score that occasionally chimes in conveys a whimsical sense of adventure, and the animation and special effects are impressive! My favorite part of this two-minute libvid? The last ten seconds, where the young protagonist explains that library staff are always “popping” up to help him if he can’t find something! Get it?? Haha!!
I’ve been thinking about animation for libvids for a while now and I think it offers a lot of possibilities. Of course students are thinking about animation more and more too. It’s great to see libraries supporting this interest, and providing the tools for students to create their own animation projects. This video from the Texas Tech Libraries, nominated in the Best Animation category, is beautifully done while showing the powerful creative tools available to students in the library’s Digital Media Studio.
With so many library systems under threat of hours cutbacks, collections budget cuts, and branch closures, library advocacy is clearly an important outreach job for librarians. This video, nominated for Best Foreign Language Video and Best Public Library Video, is one of many from public librarians in New York City. While the NYPL has a series of very high profile (and high budget) ad videos that feature Tim Gunn, Bett Midler, and many other cultural luminaries, I prefer videos like this that feature the real and non-famous) people that are served by their local public library. This particular video, in Spanish, allows a real NYPL patron to explain what her library means to her.
There are lots of videos like this and I hope there will be lots more!
By the way, we don’t know who made this one or which branch it features but if you know, we’d be happy to acknowledge them.
Using an archive for the first time can be very intimidating. Nominated for Best Narration, this informative libvid from the University of Manitoba’s Archives and Special Collections walks you through each step of the best way to use the archives. This thoughtful and thorough primer gives friendly tips throughout, defining archive-centric concepts (like finding aids) and explaining basics — from what to bring with you to where to hang your coat.
Perhaps as an homage to the Wizard of Oz, the video starts off with a series of still photographs, and bursts into moving pictures when the protagonist Kerri first enters the Land of Archives. It picks up speed, ending with a climactic montage of archives dos and don’ts.
The power of the endorsement, and its good friend, word of mouth, has been known to the marketing world since the very first widgets rolled off the assembly line. It is something we all know. If you do a good job helping a patron, or teaching a class, word will spread and it will bring more patrons, or classes, in to the library. Of course we can’t hire celebrities to sing our praises but we do have students and, as peers to our target audience, they can be pretty effective.
That’s the idea behind this video, Librarians: Pretty Incredible from Colorado College’s Tutt Library, which is nominated in the Best Documentary category. This video is part of a series featuring five thesis students describing their library experiences and how the college’s librarians helped them through the research process. Getting this kind of endorsement on video is a great outreach technique.
Anyone else doing something similar?
It’s so hard to give an earnest library introduction when there’s a big red bird trying to upstage you in the background. University of South Carolina’s Dean of Libraries Tom McNally focuses on the task at hand, but USC’s mascot does his best to ham it up.
Dean McNally is nominated for Best Acting – Librarian for not breaking character. And Cocky’s nominated for Best Acting – Non-Librarian for being a crack-up.
You did it again, UCLA. You created a well-edited, entertaining lib vid that in my opinion would sweep the Best Tears, Best Facial Expressions, and Best Use of Opera categories, but until we get more nominations for those non-existent departments you will have to settle for a Best Acting- Non-librarian and Best Editing nomination. Hey, maybe UCLA is on to something here; if libraries were more like competitive athletic events, perhaps users would come to view finding resources as an exciting challenge instead of a daunting one? 
Don’t we all wish our videos were this beautiful? Ok, maybe yours already are but mine, well, let’s just say I am having some budget envy here. That said, this library promotion video from Copenhagen Business School Library looks even better than some of the content that the other CBS has put out lately. They have a few other great videos to choose from too. This one is nominated in the Best Editing and Best Narration.
“The Swem Library of the College of William and Mary is more than a storehouse of books. The library is a vital information service center serving all members of the William and Mary Community,” begins this two-part library video.
This is a thoroughly modern idea — that a library has more to offer than just books. What makes this LibVid interesting is that this is a library introduction from 1969.
It’s fun to note the wonderful 1960s technology, from enormous duplicating machines to space-aged microform reader/printers. But mostly, this library video proves to us that libraries’ missions haven’t actually changed that much in the last 40 years. We still want our patrons to know that we have information that is useful to them.
Introduction to Swem Library is nominated for Best Narration for its authentic midcentury modern narrator.
Hitchcock
Coppola
Iñárritu
