[Web4lib] Digital Signage in Libraries

[Francis Kayiwa]

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On Jan 16, 2007, at 3:23 PM, Cox, Christopher N. wrote:

> We are fortunate to have acquired a number of plasma screens which we
> will be putting throughout the library building for student current
> awareness, marketing, etc.  Many of the implementations I have seen of
> this type of technology involve running a looped PowerPoint  
> presentation
> on the screen.  I was wondering:
>
> 1)  Does anyone run a digital signage system such as this using  
> software
> or another technology other than PowerPoint?
>
> 2)  If we use PowerPoint, we want to avoid having to update the slides
> all that often.
>
> a)  Has anyone figured out how to embed Outlook calendars in  
> PowerPoint?
> We wanted to use this to display our instruction lab's calendar to
> students each day.
> b)  Also, has anyone figured out how to embed an RSS feed into
> PowerPoint?  We use a blog for news and would love to display our  
> latest
> news stories as well as weather, world and national news, etc.

Real simple actually. I helped a friend (they have a bigger budget  
than my institution :-)) set this up by using a customized Mac OSX  
RSS Visualizer. We stripped out everything that Apple does and added  
'local channels' that feed the screen saver.

They monitors are actually powered by PowerPC G4s.

I can share the 'hacks' with you.

regards,
./fxk
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