Podcasts and Audio

I love the concept of podcast and video. There are far more positives than negatives. We could have bookchat introducting topics of interest or genre by audio. The best thing about the podcasting is that it is mobile. Load it your mp3 and away you go. I am going to subscribe to my favourite interviewer Margaret Throsby on 106.9FM each morning because I have loved that show for years and vary rarely get to hear it. (Just wait...as soon as I subscribe she'll retire!) But moving right along. Podcasts could actually be used to read books chapter by chapter or incorporate it into storytime with the presenter showing pictures or illustrations or enactments as they go along. The creativity of this is endless for children's presentations.
For library staff education presentation of topics or new developments in the field of management could be downloaded and listened to at leisure. And poscasting and video could be used to demonstrate troubleshooting of equipment or just walking all of us step by step through the task at hand.
Customers can be shown how to download and listen to podcasts of library contents...and even how to find items using the dewey method. Dont' forget our foreign language patrons. We have many multilingual staff on board that could use their talents to do translations of the most common resources available in podcast.
Regular education programs would be great to be able to replay to reflect on content and practice new concepts. Listening to someone for me is much easier than reading an instruction brochure or reading step by step instructions. I am a talking book addict and know the value to the spoken word.
Also, just the common every day procedures in the library such as opening and closing procedures could be podcast or videod.
We could do a round up of reference topics each week and share with other staff where we found information for patrons as a sort of "bank of reference knowledge".
Within each library it will be great for spreading news around locally. Beats email hands down because of different key board skills of individuals, and staff can be given weekly updates of coming events, alerts. etc
It is so good to look forward to that staff or other individuals don't have to be at events or meetings but can hear them directly after the fact. Could be podcast our meetings rather than rely on minutes which are often subjective in the content and interpretation of what was really said and happened?
Podcasting would have been great for me when I was an sole librarian in law libraries when I worked for a locum service. The quick information sharing would have been fantastic.
Nothwithstanding there are probably some legal implication to consider eg speaker, author, artist permission to podcast their work it sounds like a winner to me.
I am starting to sound like War and Peace again but it is very much a way to personalise our library, its staff and our patrons and branch library relationships.
But to make podcasting successful I think we will need to make sure that we don't have outmoded or redundant ways of communication running in tandem with it for too long once it is introduced as the new standard of communication. If we do it could quickly be seen as just another job we have to find time to do with no time to do it.