Podcasts

Podcasts are completely new to me. About all I have known of them is that my daughter downloads and listens to them via iTunes. I did catch several podcasts that libraries had created. One library did book reviews by a single staff member. Three or four I listened to were done by teen patrons and of course, were produced for other teens to promote the library. I noticed that one had a YA author recorded and had posted that as a podcast. Others just had links to podcasts about libraries in the news, that sort of thing.

The single staff member doing book reviews had the poorest audio quality of those I listened to. It sounded like a skipping record (that dates me) in a couple of places. The teen produced podcasts were sometimes too loud or the music drowned out the spoken word. The links to podcasts on news sites had the best audio quality, but overall none were so bad that I could not understand them. None of them required me to download an aggregator. I was able to listen to all of them from my computer. I liked that because we are not allowed to download anything without permission on our staff computers.

One site actually had a list of aggregators to choose from and I found that helpful. I am subscribed to so many things now, I did not feel anything cry out to me enough that I would subscribe.

I certainly think podcasts could be useful to our patrons. We could tell of upcoming events, programming, meeting times and our book talks could be recorded. Even the storytimes could be recorded, I suppose. I enjoyed this thing because I learned something.