The purpose of the Student Multimedia Design Center Blog is to share, explore, and gather information that could help us as staff of the Student Multimedia Design Center as we seek ways to increase our own knowledge of multimedia -- the combination of video, audio, and/or graphics -- to help users at the service desk.
Basically the blog allows us as Center staff to do our jobs better. The greater knowledge we have of current technology, the greater chance we have of understanding and assisting library users in their projects.
For this purpose, we, as a department, need to follow certain standards to make our blog as useful as possible.
1) Stay on topic – Sure that video of the cat falling behind the sofa is absolutely hilarious, but what does it have to do with multimedia? Please keep your posts relevant to work and the multimedia world. If you're not sure if what you want to post qualifies as "multimedia-related", ask a staff member.
2) Have fun – Just because we're staying on one topic doesn't mean you can't have fun posting. I'm sure no one wants to trudge through gigantic walls of text that read like an instruction manual for your new television. If you see something interesting, post it. If you see a cool video shot a certain way, or some excellent examples of photography, or an interesting Photoshop how-to guide, or a story of a problem you solved at the center that may help other workers in the future, post it!
3) Post frequently – The minimum number of posts for a student worker is once a month. Staff members must write a post or comment on a post once a week. We highly encourage you to post or comment more frequently than the minimum as we want to have this be as active a blog as possible.
4) Avoid Plagiarism – Okay, this may not be a term paper you're working on, but we still need to know your sources! If you copy and paste text from somewhere else, at least give us a blurb explaining what it is and where you got it.
5) Avoid "Hotlinking" – Another no-no of the blogging world is called hotlinking. When you embed video or photos, the website that you take the photo or video from is the site that takes the hit in bandwidth. Many sites don't appreciate the unauthorized use of their bandwidth and some sites will even change the picture or video to something inappropriate or a message telling you not to hotlink (which in turn will appear on our blog). Please make sure the site you are embedding from explicitly allows embedding of media. Otherwise, just link to the page that contains the pictures.
6) Please refrain from inappropriate content and language – Let's try to keep this blog as family-friendly as possible. We work in a place with many varied personalities and different levels of tolerance for vulgarity and obscenity. The blog is representative of us as a department and as a library and we must look our best! So please avoid profanity and inappropriate content.
7) Don't be afraid of posting! – In order for our blog to succeed, we need as much participation as possible! That means not being afraid of posting something even if you think it's trivial or only of interest to you. No one is going to judge you and tell you what a horrible job you did, so you may as well just post it! Who knows, you may even win treat of the week!
