Week 7 - Podcasting and Online Hosted Video

Questions for this week:

• Discuss how you felt about the experience of using YouTube. What you think about this service. Do you see any potential uses for Podcasting in the library? If so what and why?

I feel confident about using YouTube to share videos for the worldwide audience of Web users. YouTube has been going strong for years now and is adept at providing search tools, channels, and user development tools to help users fine tune their experiences. I'm excited that I can push videos directly to my Facebook or MySpace account.

Podcasting can be used in a library to help make user tools more portable. Boring! Who wants to *hear* how to wrangle PubMed or find impact factors. What's really useful for a user community is the podcast content that comes from a library as a place (and not many other places). There are podcasts of authors speaking, library dedications, story hours for kids, and local history narratives. I haven't found one yet, but a walking tour of the town could be distributed via the local library's podcast set. Library Sucecss, a Best Practice Wiki, provides a list of libraries that do podcasts. The Sunnyvale Public Library has one podcast of a storytime presentation featuring Russian songs. Librarians at schools are using podcasts to share events and kid creations. At San Mateo High School, kids in Ms. Pennington's 7th period class have podcasted book reports. What a great way to share resources and engage learners.

Why use podcasting in a library setting? To capture what would otherwise sit on a VHS tape and be available only to the one person who wants to check it out or to the three people who want to come in to the library to see it on-site. Podcasting can help libraries provide a nearly immediate outlet for what "what are you doing for me" questioners. It helps raise literacy in a new community of users. It provides a quick link to the library's activities and a record of events that can be enjoyed again and again. Podcasting can fortify the library's place in the community as a creator and keeper of culture.

I am currently enjoying a great series of posts from UNC-Chapel Hill about knowledge management, digital information, library science and learning. Check out the background article and then see all of the YouTube videos on the UNC-Chapel Hill channel. Below, danah boyd, a blogger, thinker and student (who discusses issues I care about) gives an "impromptu talk on the development and applications of social networking on the WWW with particular emphasis on young adults and implications for personal relationships" in one of the UNC-CH “Information in Life” series casts.