Podcasting Experience
Podcasting is perhaps the Web 2.0 toy that I'm the least enthusiastic about. I'm personally not the audio learner so I prefer video over podcasts and a human over video. It was a neat idea to actually use the podcast to add content for our group project, so it was a really new experience for me. One, I was recording a podcast and two, I was reporting a topic I'm not exactly rock solid on. Anyways, in retrospect, it's a fairly neat medium. If you're getting walked through in a podcast on how to do something, you obviously want to click and try for yourself. Just watching some disembodied clicking wouldn't teach you much, but listening to a podcast while monkey hears and monkey does can be a good thing.
YouTube is pretty popular, but I think I may have found an actual use for podcasts because of this class. Our first speaker mentioned a podcast on a short tour of the library. It's like the museum audio tours that walk you through. As a podcast, it's great because anyone with an mp3 player can download it and go. A cassette or CD would have to physically be tracked down and having a large stack of these could be taking up precious space. Alternatively, if you only have one copy and it's checked out or damaged, your nifty library audio tour goes to waste.
I can see libraries using podcasts to walk patrons through their online databases. How many times have I anticipated problems with accessing a database at home for the patron? I spend a good few minutes of my life going through the steps and warn them against the pitfalls and it's really the same speech. If I can do a podcast walk through, that would be awesome. Instead of me sitting there, you have a friendly librarian recording that walks you through instead of relying on a shoddy memory or barely legible set of notes. You could potentially do a whole mini series for each database and have your friendly librarian that repeats instructions as many times as you want without the friendly librarian suddenly snapping because they've said the same thing for the seven hundredth time today. Nifty.
Of course there is hesitation from people about using podcasts. First of all, I'm proposing a new name for "podcast." Not everyone has an iPod and I'm sure some of the less tech savy may be warned off because they don't have an iPod. Really, you just need something that plays mp3s.
Another way that libraries can make podcasts more user friendly would be maybe an excited voice. I know, my podcast is not exactly awe inspiring, but I was shooting more for clarity. You could potentially have podcast stories for kids. Kids have iPods. Lots of kids have a more updated iPod than me. Why not just do an audio book? Because sometimes the kids get attached to the librarian. They also might have loved the story time. I've turned around twice and found my books in the hands of small children trying to immitate me.
Libraries could also do podcasts on topics for those that don't read well. Information about the digital TV conversion might be awesome for older patrons and having a Spanish language version could be really useful too. It's a topic that won't have an informational video available to the public and I'm sure libraries know their community enough to add in some information that they predict their patrons will ask like where you can get a converter box. You would presumably go more in depth than a quick thirty second TV ad spot.
Podcasts in libraries could be very useful after you change the name and more people figure out what they are. The next generation is coming up soon, so it's not very far fetched to do podcast series in libraries. The technology is not that expensive and once you have patrons that know what mp3s are, you can be optimistic about the possibilies.
