Thing #20: Podcasts

Polly Mae and I tried to explore the world of podcasts. We were trying to figure out the benefits of using podcasts over YouTube. For instructional purposes, it seems that videos would be much more helpful for patrons. I guess the fact that podcasts use RSS feeds is part of why they are so popular, but I'm not sure how many of our patrons would subscribe to our feed if we even had one.

We searched for sports stuff and library stuff on most of the search engines:

Podcast.net
We found a series about the library and listened to part of an episode called "Understanding The Libraries Brand: The OCLC Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources Report" The search engine seems simple enough to use and I like the way the display the results of the episodes.

Podcastalley.com
I did not like the search features of this one at all. I tried to search by genre at least and the results were a huge list of titles; I think it would be much more helpful if it at least displayed a description of each podcast or the tags used by it. Also, when I tried to play one it told me I have to download the "Podcast Aggregator" I thought we didn't have to download anything through these sites...

Yahoo Podcasts
Now this one I liked! I found ILL student Kot Hordynski on it! By the way, he was on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman this morning if you guys want to check it out. Also, here is the link to the podcast I found for him while he as at the 2006 ACLU Conference:http://www.aclu.org/multimedia/2006conference/oct16_kot.mp3
I checked out the "Library Channel" from Arizona State University and found out about their downtown campus library.

Library Success - A Best Practices Wiki: Podcasts
I peeped some of the public library podcasts and they had things like the teen poetry slam, guests talks with authors, book club stuff, etc. Let me tell you though, Washington State University is using podcasts the way that I can picture us using them. Listen to some of these titles of episodes: Help Searching: Choosing Search Terms; Narrowing your search using the AND command; Expanding your search; How to Use Databases....etc. While I still think that videos would be more helpful, I can see us using podcasts as a tool for our patrons like WSU does.