Podthoughts

After finishing my podcast, I have all these thoughts, here are just a few, in no particular order.

1. After listening to the podcasts of my classmates, I really wished I got the music sites to play properly so I could incorporate that into my podcast. Those intros/outros really helped set the tone of a piece.

2. I thought I sounded so great when I was doing my bit, but then listening to the finished product, it was all right, but not as great as I wanted it to be. Maybe using a script would be a better option.

3. I could really do a weed-of-the-month podcast. The library world could really use a podcast like that...It could be called, "What Not to Keep" or "Weed Wise" or "Weed Away" or "Something Weeded This Way Goes."

4.Weeding advice for specific sections could be the main focus of podcasts but a few podcasts could be set aside for more general weeding issues. The first episode could answer the question "why weed." Another podcast could be about general criteria for weeding. Another podcast could give suggestions on where to go to find replacements. Another could share ideas on what to do with books/materials once they have been weeded from the collection. Another podcast could include ways to "sell weeding" to the school population since it can be something that has to be defended." Those nuggets could be really useful, and the program could be created by several librarians, not just me.

Could I make this work?...I don't know...Hmm...

p.s. I've postdated this entry because I want it to be near my published podcast, and these are thoughts I woke up with last Sunday morning, so I figure it was better to put them by that date.

Look Ma! a Podcast!

I know she'll be proud. I also know she knows a lot about my podcast topic since she helped me in my library for two days straight! Thanks for all the hard work, Momma!
In my podcast I talk about weeding a library collection, plus I got to make "weed" a tag, which could disgruntle some listeners in search of something else.

Hear the work of students in LIS 460, including me!

Weed Wise: Atlases





Enjoy! And this below is my Podcast criteria, based on listening to several and trying my own hand at it. What do you think? Kudos to all those those succeed at this on a regular basis!

Good Podcasts ...

• are well paced, with little to no dead air
  
• if the podcast is too slow, a listener will lose interest
• if too fast, the listener won't be able to keep up
  
• are well edited
  
• with few ums, ahs, audible breaths, and/or dead space
• sections can be moved, shifted, deleted to fit the main idea of the podcast
  
• follow a logical progression
  
• it's less important that podcasters tell me what they are going to do then that they lead me on a journey in which I become invested
• stay focused and on topic
• include voices that are clear and articulate
• have a conversational manner or other persona
  
• allow us all to become This American Life documentarians
• voices are animated, not monotone
  
• engage the listener in some manner
  
• podcasters are aware that someone else is listening
• elicit listener response
• can make people laugh out loud or shiver or think
• stay within the allotted time
  
• good podcasts edit information to meet the podcast length.
  
• Grammar Girl just does ONE lesson in a podcast, one soundbite of information, not several
  
• take advantage of the form itself
• follow the Boy Scout Motto "Be Prepared"
  
• even if it is just lose notes, prep and planning is needed before the record button is ever pushed
• make all aspects of the podcast relevant
  
• if music is included it should support the main ideas or goals or tenor of the podcast program
  

Tech transformations

Everytime I check Twitter, there's a new article for me to read. Everytime I read that article, it leads me to another article, and so on and so on. Suddenly, I've spent hours surfing through articles on the librarians at ALA or reviews from the NYT or links to ways to make an avatar on Yahoo!, and then I find the world of podcasts that needs to be explored, like Grammar Girl, and their corresponding websites. I also found a podcast from ProQuest explaining how to access newspapers from home via the internet. How can I create those mini-videos to embed on our website? Those types of tutorials could be sweet.

Then I find new blogs from AASL to read where, instead of talking about ALA, they are talking about NECC, and some comments bring up ideas that don't seem revolutionary to me, though the blogs approach them as such. It makes me realize that as behind in the times as I am in terms of certain technologies, I am not completely ignorant. I've kept my ears and eyes open to learning where people are going with computers, and certain softwares.

As my del.icio.us page attests to, I've found a way to personally use that site for a year now. Though I still struggle with how to integrate some of those/these technologies into the classroom. In listening to the Grammar Girl podcast I think, the English department could really benefit from these, and I wonder what other podcasts I could introduce to the faculty, how they could livestream them so it doesn't take server space, and if there's room on the school server to create podcasts of our own.

Later, I was watching my favorite video blog (vlog) of John Green (author of Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines)and his brother Hank Green called Brotherhood 2.0 and what is Hank doing but reading. The next day, John's talking about ALA. But back to Hank, in his vlog he's reading The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman, and he questions the acceptability of adults reading young adult books. What follows in the comments is lots of cheering for YA novels as well as thick discussion of the upcoming movie for The Golden Compass. Being the surfer I've been all day, I head to the website, and try to create my own daemon. Here's what they gave me, a jackel:



I've tried to embed the image from the site, and hope it works. I figure that is a test in and of itself. I can't see the image when I use Firefox, but can when I use Safari, so please let me know what happens when you read this post.

Seems a little mean to me (the choice of jackel), and apparently it can be changed but...I know this site is created to promote the movie, but there are other books like Lemony Snicket which certainly take advantage of the world wide interweb to help promote their books. How well to libraries and librarians pay attention to this? It seems we should.

Maybe, after all this searching, my real question becomes: what's the priority? Where do libraries and librarians enter the tech world and how much is truly necessary to stay current and provide the best services to users? How do we become efficient surfers so that students can learn from us, how to move through the interweb with limited distraction. Maybe distraction is fine (it is, really), but all the surving and exploring and discovery takes time. What is the minimum a library needs to know in order to serve the most people?