LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

By now, everyone should have gotten their graded papers back. If you haven't received anything from me, please let me know and I'll send it again. I found all of your papers really fascinating; there were a lot of really interesting analyses of social software tools and their uses in different contexts.

When I think about applying podcasting to libraries and library service, my main question is: How will patrons get to the podcasts?  In other words, where would they be located and how would customers find them?  I have two visions, and am interested to hear what yours are as well.

Vison #1:

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

When I worked at a high school, I held library orientation for Freshman at the beginning of each school year.  Inevitably, there were students who missed it or transferred into our school after orientation.  It was always easy to identify these students as classes began working on research assignments.  I would then attempt to provide them an on-the-spot, watered down version of the orientation.  Having the orientation available as a podcast would really work wonders (and would be a way to clone myself) for getting students up to speed.  Most likely, the podcast wou

What I learned: Aside from recording an interview for another class, I had not used any of the recording equipment or created mp3 files. I didn’t think that there was much to creating a podcast. Well after putting a lot of thought to what I wanted to create and having to face putting my voice “out there”, I was able to really come away with something that I plan to use this summer. I had the idea of creating book talks for our teen website and highlighting either book club selections or specials displays.

Early on in this class, we talked about how to make blogs more interesting, and one of the ways to do that was by using narrative.  I used my podcast to tell a story...and I thought it was an interesting one at least!  I was thinking that I could use podcasts to do a short series on some of the interesting things that we do have in our special collections, and get creative by maybe including some short interviews with the professors who have used the collections.  I'm sort of just thinking through writing here...

Podcasts are a library tool that I have mixed feelings about.  When I first read the topic for this week and started thinking about the concept of libraries with podcasts, I didn't see the need for them at all.  It seemed to me like the classic example of libraries seeing a technology and using it because it's new and "in," not because it will be the best tool to serve the library's patrons.  What information, I wondered, would be better on a podcast than it would be in text or pictures on a website?  Certainly not library news or events--that does much better

I haven't had the opportunity to listen to many podcasts before, and none from libraries, so I found the examples very illustrative, since they proved to be from a wide variety of different libraries using different formats, themes, and content. I liked the Alden Library's tour podcast: even without having ever seen the library before, I could picture it by her description. I imagine for new students, or students looking to become more familiar with their library, this would be a very helpful tool.

Never using Garage Band before, I thought my experience with the software went relatively smooth. I wasn't able to get the jingles in that I wanted. I think this was because I decided to not use my headset with microphone, the feedback was horrible, but I used the computer's isight mic instead.  I'm not a hundred percent sure why this was the case, but I'd rather have clarity over a fancy podcast.