The Bioscreencast Blog

How often have you heard someone say ” I dont know how you look for something in there” . Database querying and search has become an essential skill to possess in this genomic age.  Be it PUBMED , FlyBase or the PDB, we all rely on these databases to find our everyday information.

As Jon Udell commented in  his article on search strategies, database querying is definitely a skill , and good searchers tend to have deep and hidden reservoirs of tacit skill that they can harness . And, as he says , like many other skills effective search can be learned.

We at Bioscreencast.com believe that screencasts are a good way to capture user-database interactions . It was for this reason that we decided to have a category in our library called “Databases and Biosearch”.  Thanks to uploads like the recent one from the PDB , we have user uploaded screencasts that show you how to search databases, ranging from the new Uniprot database , the gaggle proteomics workbench to the Membrane Protein databank .

We hope that the next time you hit on a clever querying strategy  or put together a public database, you screencast it for us all to benefit from.

We are always wanting to get the word out about bioscreencast and the benefits of screencasting as a medium of sharing knowledge. The way we see it, we really want to get scientists and students alike sharing their screencasts on our site and try our best to tell everyone about it.

It felt nice to see our short spiel about our site featured on slideshare, which incidentally is a good way to share your presentations and slides with others.

Check out our slides on slideshare here

A similar post was posted at bbgm

The session on Communicating Science with Video at the Scifoo Lives On section on Second Nature (SLURL) was loads of fun. There were three presentations. I kicked things off by talking about Bioscreencast, then Jean-Claude gave a talk about how he has leveraged YouTube for recording experiments, and finally someone from SciVee gave a talk on SciVee. Berci live blogged the whole session.

Picture credit - Berci Mesko via a Creative Commons license

The session was rather well attended. Both Hari and I were able to attend. I hope we gave people an idea of what Bioscreencast is all about and what we are trying to do. It was really cool to have the SciVee folks presenting as well and to find out a little more about the SciVee backstory. There were some excellent questions as well. One of the people in the audience, a social scientist (I forget the avatar) suggested that we host flash animations as well. That’s a wonderful idea and it fits into our philosophy of allowing people to learn via the web. The barrier to creating flash animations is a lot higher, so we don’t expect too many, but looking forward to our first one. In general, I am looking forward to questions and screencasts from today’s attendees.

I also put up a modified (longer) version of today’s presentation on Slideshare.

[slideshare id=107198&doc=bioscreencast-capturing-the-life-sciences-frame-by-frame1068&w=425]

As usual, silence from our end means that we are busy working on making Bioscreencast.com an even better experience. So keep your eyes on this page, since we have a couple of really cool updates up our sleeves.

In the meantime you might want to check out some screencasts about MYourScience, UniProt and OWL