The University of Canterbury Libraries in Christchurch, New Zealand are running a Skype-based video pilot for their national Library Week. I’ve been communicating with Engineering Information librarian Deborah Fitchett about the experiement – she initially contacted me about potential Skype security and bandwidth concerns from her campus IT department (we’ve not had any issues, by the way). She posted today with more information on how they’re setting things up.
I’m interested to hear how things go for them – initial reports from Deborah are that after the initial “that’s a camera?” freakout the service is well received by students. It looks like they’re using Skype largely as a publicity measure at the moment, allowing users to communicate with peers at several other New Zealand universities. I believe they will be examining Skype’s broader potential for library use during this pilot.
The fact that their Engineering blog is called the Cog n’ Blog is also worth noting, I think.
info-mational 