I knew I also wanted to have characters of varying ethnicities and ages, which would equate well with the actual makeup of the student body at ECU. This struck me as the perfect name for my hero, an everyman. Since the ECU mascot is a pirate, I began to research famous historical pirates from the 1700s online. There was always a recognizable cast of characters in the strips. I thought about the comics page in the newspaper that I read on Sunday morning when I was younger. I started to sketch out the basics of my cartoon. What if cartoons could be one way for me to break up some of the text in Joyner Library’s LibGuides, and breathe a little life into them? I created an account on the free online site while he was talking and began fiddling with the software in the free moments we were provided during our break time. In one presentation, a group mentor for the instructional session suggested the use of a cartooning software called ToonDoo for creating an avatar to post in Blackboard. Overhauling and improving LibGuides was a goal of mine in the position since day one.Īs part of my job orientation, I attended a week-long workshop called Teaching with Technology through ECU’s Office for Faculty Excellence. This left many of the pages text heavy and in need of updating. As early adopters of the platform, the librarians had taken a primarily text-based homegrown system, Pirate Source, and moved many of their online help pages into LibGuides. In my new position, I found myself at a large academic library that was already using LibGuides heavily. In July 2011, I was a recently minted librarian starting as the instructional design librarian at East Carolina University’s (ECU) Joyner Library. In this article, I will tell you about my own experience creating cartoons with a free Web-based tool, as well as give you tips and tricks for getting this started at your library. 2 There are others that can do the same thing, including Pixton, Bitstrips, and GoAnimate. The product that I used was called ToonDoo. In fact, there are many cartoon software products available for free on the Web that are easy to learn and require little artistic talent. I did not need to draw, nor did it cost me anything but my time. I decided to take on a small-scale cartooning project that has been very successful for our library, in that it has added color, personality, and life to our LibGuides. That is not to say that cartooning is only for the professional-artist-turned-librarian. Although the article was a joy to read, few of our academic libraries have the kind of talent or time needed to complete such a large-scale project. 1 The zombie-themed tome was the product of hours of work by a library employee with a natural gift for drawing. Michael Hall presented their amazing full-length graphic novel used to instruct information literacy concepts. In the July/August 2011 cover article of C&RL News, authors Matt Upson and C.
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