The Media Services Department at TRU has asked the Library to take over circulation of the small electronics — cameras, voice recorders, etc. — which makes sense perfect sense because we are open in the evenings and on weekends, and they’re not.

Some of the staff are quite resistant to the idea, mostly because they will be expected to show the patrons how to use them.  These sorts of things used to come with quick guides, designed to get the user started without having to wade through the entire manual, but they don’t seem to anymore, so it’s a 150 page user manual or nothing.

So I volunteered to write quick guides for these items.  These guides are made to be used by both staff and patrons, and — like all of my quick guides — are designed to include the 20% of the information that users will need 80% of the time.

Because I sometimes find it difficult to relate a line drawing to the corresponding item, I decided to go with labeled photographs.  The idea is that using the experience of using these guides should be as near as possible to the experience of actually being shown how to use the equipment in person.