It's all in the presentation

Powerpoint (or Keynote for Mac users) is really nifty, it's even helped win an Oscar whilst raising awareness of climate change with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I would argue for the usefulness of being able to access slides after presentations, perhaps after a user education session in a library, as I would do during my degree. Most lecturers used Powerpoint and then posted their presentations on our VLE. These ranged from the very useful (bibliographies and quotes) to the useless if you weren't actually in the lecture theatre variety - one lecturer used to illustrate points about Victorian literature with Lolcats, generally with no captions, you just had to be there. And unless you wanted to write an essay on Lolcats, you really couldn't skip those lectures. Although actually I would love to write an essay on Lolcats, but not if it meant failing my degree. Even without Lolcats, Slides that included lots of information or references were incredibly helpful for revision: so yay for slides!

As a free way to share presentations Slideshare feels easy to use and there is a lot of library related stuff out there. It depends on how the slides are designed again though whether it is worth looking at presentations without sound - this epic presentation on Social Networks from Paul Adams of Google is a brilliant example of how  slides alone can be understood if the information is presented in the right way.

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams.

But as Helen points out it might be better if people posted presentations with sound when the slides don't explain everything, but that is more complicated - as a simple way of getting a resource out there Slideshare does exactly what it says on the URL.  

And to make up for the mammoth presentation above, here are some easy on the eye library pics.

Beautiful Libraries in the World

View more presentations from Paulo Izidoro.