In the summer I stumbled across Camstudio, an open source program that allows you to record your desktop screen activity. This is an extremely useful product for those of us who are yet to invest in products like Adobe Captivate.

As a Librarian I feel products such as Camstudio will quickly become essential. The Internet has quickly become the only place users visit to find information, and the private nature of this activity means that many make simple mistakes. The creation of online tutorials using Camstudio allows Librarians to meet students online and provide clear visual instruction.

I have used Camstudio as a training tool for the number of online databases that we subscribe to, and have been hosting them on our Library website with additional plans to integrate them with our VLE.

Some basic examples of video tutorials that I have done can be found below. They took me minutes to do and were instantly converted to flash video files upon completion.

http://www.filton.ac.uk/lrc/howtoguides/flashtutorials/gmid.swf.html

http://www.filton.ac.uk/lrc/howtoguides/flashtutorials/sector%20briefing.swf.html