Kansas Tri-Conference 2007: Day 1 – Online Storytime – One Step Toward Making Your Webpage a Branch of Your Library

Mary Markwalter & Melissa VanTassel, Coffey County Library (www.cclibraryks.org)

• wanted to do an online storytime – staff member figured out how to do it for free.
• They use Frontpage!
• Copyright issues – you can use public domain fairytales and not worry about copyright
• If a publisher doesn’t allow something, they went directly to the author – the author said yes, and asked the publisher to do it – and the publisher contacted the library and gave permission
• offering things like online storytimes helps to make your website a digital branch of your library – coolness.
• 24/7 access to stories!
• Had a handout, “Steps for Creating a Basic Online Storytime”

Walked through playing an audio file

Discussed cheap microphones

Speaker created an audio file, merged them using Sound Recorder (!!!) – showed how easy it is to make an audio file. Editing is extremely basic – you can delete before or after a specific point.

Discussion about story length, poems vs stories, jokes and riddles…
Important point – it doesn’t have to all be done by you! Get staff involvement.

Discussed how they create the webpage for the online story

Showed storylineonline.net as an example of a well-done, next step storytime.

Easy improvements they could make (these are my ideas):

• They’re using .wav files – they should be using mp3 files
• They’re using Frontpage to make webpages – Frontpage doesn’t exist anymore, so… they’ll need to find new software
• They’re using Microsoft’s Sound Recorder. It only records 60 seconds of audio at a time… probably should be using Audacity.

Very cool that they’re using tools they know and already have to do something innovative!