So far, in my web experience, I've only found podcasts to be useful when I have a specific interest in seeing a video or hearing a spoken audio file when other static web material (text/photos/diagrams etc) have not been so useful. this has not happened much for me.
However, I can see that a lot of people would often prefer a sound or video file. For example, library customers who have poor eyesight like listening to books on CD or tape. For them, the audio podcast would be good. Although - how do they find it & start it running if they have bad eyesight? The internet is largely searched via our eyes on a web-browser - which would make this difficult for partially-sighted people, I would have thought?
For video files and audio files, obviously, this is the best way to access them on the web. I can see that all my favourite sound & video tracks & snippets are so conveniently accessible, all through this little PC. Which is amazing.
Our library is planning a digital audio book service, in partnership with a commercial vendor, who will provide digital content for a very large number of audiobooks, plus the website interface to blend with ours, providing the necessary links to digital audio players, and the books themselves.
This is a wonderful service for all library customers, especially those that are tech-savvy enough to be able to download an item to their home PC & save it onto either a CD or MP3 player for use in their car, etc, which is already a very popular use serviced by our existing physical talkingbook collections.
I'm listening to some podcasts right now. A US public library in Cheshire CT. It is interesting to listen to continuously on my PC, as a kind of radio program about the library. It contains promotional ads, book reviews & news, all mixed in with short music grabs between each item. the reviewers seem to be young adult library members. The podcast even advertises for contributors to the podcast (written material, songs, poems, essays and announcements etc). I really like the way you can rewind the podcast a bit and listen to the bit you want, a second time. Audio quality varies a bit - I guess it depends on who/where/how the recording takes place, so there is obviously a fair bit of effort required to do a good job. If we were doing something like this, I can imagine a staff member who we have here at Campbelltown who would be ideal for this sort of audio production work. The good news is, I think we already have some of the recording gear that we would need (microphones, MP3 recorders, etc) So this looks like a definite area for our promotional section. It would also help us develop our website offering. I can see it being highly valued by home bound customers perhaps, as well as young adults. But there is also no reason why we couldn't feature some podcasts of narrated children's books on our website (have to check the copyright implications of this - if we produce the recording, is it OK to put up on the site?)
ReplyDeleteHere's the link to that podcast:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.archive.org/download/cpl_podcast_episode_20/episode20_64kb.mp3