Perseverance and Play: Making a Movie for the YouTube Generation

Ramona Islam,Leslie Porter

doi:10.31641/ulj150103

Abstract

In place of a traditional library orientation lecture at Fairfield University, librarians created a choose-your-own-adventure movie for use in the classroom with an audience response system (ARS), allowing students to vote using clickers. The library administration took a risk by sponsoring the project, but the library director believed in her staff and let us run with our ideas. When we proposed the movie, we did not have an idea for the script; we simply knew we wanted to make a movie and show it in class. Why did we decide to do this when the status quo wasn't disastrous? Like people in any industry, we were pushing ourselves to change with the times, to make our information delivery more engaging—entertaining even. Working under the charge to constantly evaluate and assess our instruction program, we questioned whether it mattered if librarians or professors liked the lecture. Who was the audience after all? If we were going to be successful, we had to captivate our students, the "Millennials," by showcasing the library, its spaces and its services, as the answer to many of their varied needs: social, educational, and recreational. In pursuit of this end, we worked with the Media Center, recruited student filmmakers, employed plenty of brainstorming, wrote a successful script, and produced Fairfield Beach: the Library. The ingredients were simple: perseverance and play. What follows is how we put them together.

Highlights

Imagine you are a first-year student at a private university, and, as part of your required English course, your class visits the library
After the librarian greets everyone, you are handed a device that looks like a mutant calculator or cell phone, and the lights go down
Maybe a library movie is a lame idea, but at least you will get to vote on what happens with this “clicker” thing

Summary

Introduction

Imagine you are a first-year student at a private university, and, as part of your required English course, your class visits the library. In 1993, With the help of a professional scriptwriter, librarians at California State University, Long Beach partnered with the university’s media production department to create Liberspace, a fast-paced library movie akin to an MTV video or infomercial.

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Conclusion