Monday, December 13, 2010

Casting off

Old Gregg has never subscribed to pod/vod or screen casts before. The possibilities for personal and professional applications has opened up.....

Looking at the libraries that currently use podcasts it seems to be mostly book reviews, author talks and other informative talks. It's a great idea but Old Gregg honestly found a lot of them quite boring! Old Gregg thinks if it is done right podcasts can be a great way to reach people and engage them but the participants have to be engaging as does the subject matter. Our libraries run some bookclubs, maybe a book synopsis and the group discussions would be interesting and show those who are curious how a bookclub can be run. Staff and patrons enthusiastic about a particular author/genre could review their latest pick. Storytime complete with sound effects would be good. Oral histories about the history of the area would be interesting. The possibilities really are endless.


For his own interests Gregg has added Triple J's live music podcasts as an RSS feed to google reader, this way Gregg never has to miss a Like a Version again!

7 comments:

  1. Remind me I have Volume 6 of Like a Version (CD & DVD) on my desk to catalogue :)

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  2. They could also work if you have 'Training' or learn about the library for patrons. But need to remember Library = Fun not boring.

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  3. Yes. The potential for boring our patrons to death concerns me when thinking about creating pod-casts ourselves. I think it would be much better to just advertise/link to the exciting ones.

    Or maybe we could get Stephen Fry to do all of our future podcasts for us.

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  4. Yes, they definitely need to be engaging. We don't want our patrons falling asleep on us now.

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  5. Tomake them engaging will need imagination and time

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  6. I like the refreshing nature of the "warts and all" podcasts. Like oral histories, there's great diversity in the way people articulate their stories. Maybe we have become too accustomed to the scripted and edited conversations and dialogue in the media.

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