Podcasting

I'm enjoying this week's lesson. What follows is my rambling, if enthusiastic notes on it. Podcasting seems simple in theory. A podcast is a non-music audio or video recording distributed over the internet. P O D = Personal on Demand. You can download it from a website onto an MP3 player or iPOD. To listen all you need is a PC with headphones or speakers. This week's video said you can subscribe and download automatically when new content is added, unlike with streaming. The Apple iPOD was the player for which the first podcasting scripts where developed, and podcasting is a "backronym" from iPOD. Other new terms I learned were vodcast = video podcast; and iTunes (a free tool for podcasting).

I listened to 2 British Library podcasts. One was a discussion of new CDS of British and American writers. The podcast featured soundclips of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf (her only known published recording from 1938). It was fascinating to hear their voices. Fitzgerald read a Shakespeare speech with a recognisable American accent, but spoke more slowly than I am used to hearing American actors speak.

I also listened to a podcast tour of a British Library exhibition "Taking liberties" which touched on suffragettes, the Magna Carta, the history of Parliament and much more.

Then I did a subject search of the ABC's podcasting website. I chose "Arts and entertainment", then an Australian Music podcast site. When I clicked on a title it took me to the announcer Margaret Throsby's website. Then I went back and clicked a link at the bottom of the entry and found a list of music podcasts. (I chose one of the Song Company with a spoken introduction.) Entry to these was more roundabout and not as slick as on the British Library site, but I expect there would be many more podcasts here as the ABC is a broadcaster. I wonder if the British Library archive theirs.

On the Library Success Wiki, Cheshire Public Library and Orange County Library Service had podcasts for teens. Orange County Library Service site had an ad for a 'teen talent show'. There was also a Manga videogame party ad with teen girls conversing - I thought these were a good way of getting this age group's attention. There seemed to be duplicate links to podcasts which corresponded to different download formats like MP3 and WMA.

I think there would be a wealth of applications for podcasting in libraries. One for clients would be author talks; my library has about eight of these per month. Staff could either record the whole speech; or a brief introduction advertising the author, subject and date of the talk (as Orange County Library did for Mark McEwen). Children's Services and Local History could use podcasting for storytimes, exhibition introductions, and oral history for clients. Staff could record important staff meetings for staff that couldn't be there.

P.S. I thought I might have to blog about this subject in 2 different posts, but the blog gremlins sorted themselves out. When I first wrote my blog entry for Week 8 on Answerboards, I saved it as a draft before trying to publish it. I tried twice to publish it but it would not appear as a published post even though the message appeared "Your post published successfully". When I tried to view it it only showed Week 7 and earlier. I could view and edit my Week 8 draft though. This was frustrating - until I published my week 8 post and the week 7 one appeared under it.
They now appear on my blog! :-)