Thing 7

Having no prior experience with podcasting, I was eager to try this "thing." I went to the list on the Library Success Wiki - but had little success there! I clicked on 8 or 9 different libraries, finding podcasts that looked interesting, but when I entered the URLs as subscriptions in Google Reader I received a red message box stating that there was no feed for that address. Also, many of the links just led to a library's home page, where it wasn't always easy to find any "buried" podcasts. (So as a directory, this wasn't all that helpful.) Then I clicked on the Kankakee Public Library which has numerous podcasts available. Here you can just click on them to listen with no further steps necessary. How wonderfully simple! I listened to part of a podcast of a lecture/discussion session with book critic Liesl Schillinger. It was an hour long so I only tuned in for a small part, although she was an interesting speaker and I may go back to that. Looking for another library-related podcast I went to the Muskingum College Library and listened to part of an author talk by the writer of "Historic Tours of Ohio." In this case, when I clicked on the link, the podcast was downloaded to my computer in a temporary folder, realplayer popped up, and I listened to a bit of the lecture. Still hoping to access at least one podcast following the 10 things directions, I then went to the Podcast Alley Directory and chose "Nobody Likes Onions." I was able to subscribe to this one through Google Reader per the instructions. Unfortunately, it was an obnoxious broadcast - the background "music" so annoying that I couldn't even follow the conversation. In spite of all the different situations I encountered in exploring "thing 7," I think podcasting is a wonderful new technology. I know that many schools are using this as a means of making classroom lectures available and I think that it presents a real opportunity for libraries. I'm sure that many of our patrons would appreciate having author talks and other lecture/type programs held at SPL made available in this format. I, myself, would find this a useful way of listening to programs that I am unable to attend in person. I would hope, however, that we would make it as simple as possible for our users (meaning those who, like me, are novices to this technology) to access these podcasts, possibly following the example of the Kankakee Public Library.