This week is orientation week at Victoria University, and yesterday I gave my first orientation session to the students. This presentation was a pretty simple introduction to all things library, with a friendly and welcoming tone, for first years up at the central Kelburn library. I’ll be taking some more complex ones soon enough, for Second Year Design, and hopefully Architecture, too.

For this talk, which I’ll be repeating on Thursday (tomorrow!), my main goal was just to encourage the students to talk to their reference librarians when it comes time to start thinking about their assignments.

All in all, I think my first run through went pretty well, though I was about five minutes under time, which means I can possibly embellish a bit more. I’m particularly pleased as it was an excellent opportunity to try out two neat resources: Creative Commons image search and Powerpoint with Google Documents.

So, take a look at my presentation - and then read on for more about the two best parts of the process of putting it together. You can have a look at the full screen version, if you prefer.

There’s nothing like having wonderful images to accompany your slides, and the creative commons search page is an excellent place to start. You can search Google, Yahoo, and Flickr - as well as lesser-known Blip TV (for video), OWL (for music), and SpinXpress (a range of media formats) - with automatic creative-commons filtering, directly from the search page. You can’t meta-search across all three at options at once, unfortunately - but clicking a different tab will replicate your search in that sources.

Flickr is definitely the best choice for great images for presentations. The Flickr community is generally made up of above-average photographers, and significant number of people (myself included) tag their photos as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This means that you can freely use their work, but must credit them, you’re not allowed to sell what you make, and if you modify what they’ve made you must share the new work you’ve made under the same license.

Having snagged my photos from Flickr, I put my presentation together completely using Google Documents’ new presentation tool. I’m impressed with how well it works. Sure, you can’t use MS PowerPoint features like slide transitions, but those just seem unnecessarily flashy anyway. I particularly like the online presentation mode, complete with chat menu down the right hand side. I can see this working really well for a low-budget distance class somewhere out there. The group could sign on to a group audio/videoconferencing chat client (such as Skype), and then listen to the instructor speak, watch the slides via Google Documents, and type in their comments and responses.

I particularly like that idea because it is further hammering in the same concept we’re using when arguing for Instant Messaging reference services over traditional Virtual Reference clients - that an collection of different software working together (e.g. IM + IM agreggator client + wiki), is far more powerful a tool than the “all-in-one” proprietary system. It’s another way we can surround ourselves with a flexible network of tools.