ANimated Tutorial Sharing Project Announcement

The ANTS Working Group would like to announce that we have a new site and new location for uploaded tutorials (in addition to DSpace).

The new ANTS site (which integrates the Web Page and Wiki onto one site, is now found at:

http://ants.wetpaint.com

Anyone can register to make postings to this wiki or receive RSS feeds from it. In addition, you can also set up you own personal profile so people can learn more about each contributor.

Beyond this, you should notice that we expanded our repertoire of potential tutorials so that we now have a listing of Information Literacy Tutorials identified for development. Many institutions are creating some wonderful ones, and we now welcome contributions for tutorials that are not strictly e-resource tutorials. People have been asking us whether we would accept different types of tutorials and we always said yes. Now we have an official list for them.

Another new development is that we now have an additional site that you can go to in order to view tutorials and locate source code. It is located at our Screencast.com site which Techsmith so graciously allowed us to test this year for free. The Screencast.com site is a step forward as it (1) displays some tutorials – especially Camtasia ones – better than DSpace, and (2) as it provides people with the code they need to embed tutorials on Web Sites or blogs. This new site is located at:

http://www.screencast.com/users/ants/folders/Database%20Tutorials

One last bit of news: ANTS is currently doing some Beta testing on BLIP.TV. We like it as it has some wonderful push technology that would enable us to notify people of the existence of any new tutorial via some very popular Internet sites.

Both the Screencast.com and the Blip.TV sites allow people to embed source code for each tutorial. Both sites allow creators to retain ownership and assign creative commons rights so that others can use your tutorials. We still require people to upload files to DSpace initially for security and archival purposes. But we will then be moving files to sites where embedding code is available - as several people have requested it as a feature they would like to see added to the project.

The ANTS Team.