Copenhagen University Library consists of 6 faculty libraries, 18 department libraries and a wide range of different services and systems. How do you explain this to new students who suffers from information overload and is trying to figure out a whole new life on campus? First of all – you don’t! Focus on what they need to know in the given context and give them that. I believe that on faculty library level our best shot is the 15 minutes of intro we give to all new classes together with the IT department at Social Sciences.  Just the basic need-to-know stuff like locations, opening hours, course literature print, wifi etc.

The Library brick by brick 

But the University Library is a different and more complex story – at least in Copenhagen. At the Faculty Library of Social Sciences we made a LEGO stop-motion library movie last year to make a better connection with the new students. It was a great success so we thought why not use that idea and explain the University Library brick by brick. So we got our LEGO groove on and made a new movie – it looks like this:

The movie is made with stop-motion technique were objects are moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. The movie is simply made with an iPhone 5 and the free stop-motion app iMotion. The sound and speak is recorded directly into a Macbook and both movie, sound and speak was edited in iMovie. After the voice recording the sound files was cut into different pieces so it could be puzzled into the different scenes of the films. For scenografic we sat up a little LEGO Lab in a meeting room with different background photos of library scenes (from the different faculty libraries under the university library) and a lot of LEGO.

Marc is setting up a scene in the LEGO lab

The big premiere

Monday the 7th of September we had the big premiere at The Faculty Library of Social Science with guests, popcorn and drinks. The movie will be shown and embedded in all relevant contexts were we interact with new students.

Premiere day!

The LEGO Lab teams: Christian, Tina (who is really getting into character), Rasmus and Marc

The impact?

No doubt: A Library LEGO Movie is not the most important communication tool to connect with (new) students. That is, without any question, the skilled and hardworking librarians that meet them face to face and welcome them to there new study life with great professionalism and a smile at there face. But I do believe that this little LEGO movie – combined with the librarian and all the other communication we do – just bridge the world of libraries to the newbies at campus a little stronger. And if it doesn’t no harm is done – everybody loves LEGO, right?

Cheers

Christian