When I was more active in instructional technologies, I remember peers talking at conferences about two things: 1) how it is unfortunate that so many of us instructional librarians were creating the same online tutorial over and over for our respective institution, and 2) the difficulty in finding the time, money, and staffing to create online tutorials.

I recently heard from a woman with whom I attended library school.  She informed me that she is part of a project at NCSU Libraries that focuses on creating animated tutorials, where the content transcends institutions — rather than the teaching a user how to use a specific research tool (i.e., online catalog, article databases, etc.).  The first creation is Peer Review in Five Minutes.  The animated tutorial, as well as subsequent videos (a Wikipedia: Beneath the Surface video is coming soon), are licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States license, which basically means others are allowed to access content, adapt and share it as well.  She and her colleague are guest authors on a blog post (Narrating the “Back Story” through E-learning Resources in Libraries) at In the Library With the Lead Pipe where they this discuss project in more detail.

Additionally, one of her colleagues at NCSU also created an interactive tutorial, Anatomy of a Scholarly Article, which can be used in helping students identify a scholarly article.

They’ve been designed to share, so take a look at them.  You may want to add them to online resources you’re using at your library.  Why recreate the wheel from scratch, when resources like these are available for you to use, build on, etc.???  Have fun — and save time to boot.