Vodcasts/Podcasts

YouTube

Confucius3 was slightly apprehensive when first approaching the huge video-sharing hub 'YouTube'. This may well have had something to do with years of adolescent addiction to 'it' in at least one of our households! However after a little research we changed our minds.

Youtube fits the 'textbook' definition of Web 2.0 :
"A hypothetical next-generation Internet where people contribute as easily as they consume. It fosters collaboration and participation, you use it to share digital assets and link up with other people". 'Wired'.

This sounded all too much for us!. We soon discovered however that most peolpe just don't understand how EASY the whole YouTube process has become. Like us they may be apprehensive about technology and think it's all too complex, but it turns out that videos aren't only for professional film makers any more - EVERYONE is doing it.

The aspect of YouTube that impressed us the most is that it is designed to make the process of publishing and playing video clips EASY. If you can send an email attachment you probably have the skills to publish on YouTube. To post your own video, sign up for a FREE account and go to the upload page , select your file, click the upload video button and you're done. You don't even have to upload videos to use YouTube. If you just want to watch, it's even easier. YouTube lets users tag each clip themselves so when you play a clip the page shows a number of potential matches. It means YouTube is a mix of every video genre imaginable.

In the past we were "photo sharing" over the Internet, now YouTube is letting videos do the same, and we are all jumping onto this new technology. If Librarians want to really participate in the newest form of information sharing we also must "jump on board".

YouTube has a huge community aspect. People accessing your video via YouTube can add their views, comments, Bookmarks and subscribe to your site. YouTube can be used as a teaching tool, reaching out to students to attract their interest. Why not publish educatioinal videos informing students of library resources, tutorials and coming events e.g., HSC workshops on-line.

Choosing a video to embed into our blog post was a delightful experience. We finally settled on a video titled "Welcome to China" produced by the China National Tourism Administration, an organisation directly regulated by the state council responsible for developing promotion and regulating the China Tourism industry (thank Buddha for Beijing). This video reflected the central theme of our blog - the transition of old China into the modern world. The juxtaposition of the old ancient traditions with new technology.

"Study the past if you would define the future". "To learn, and from time to time, apply what one has learned, is'nt that a pleasure?...Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous" Confucius.

Podcasts
We were new to Podcasting so, to locate a number of samples we connected to our RSS reader Bloglines. Here we found it to be an easy process to track podcasts. Instructions were clear and easy to follow, we simply subscribed to 'your favourites' as we would any other kind of blog or news feed in Bloglines. We then sat back and listened to 'The Conversation Hour with Richard Fidler', 'Self Improvement Wednesday with Richard Glover'....very impressive procedure. We went on to explore a podcast directory 'podcast,net'. The amount of possible podcasts/subject areas available was overwhelming and also,the way the site was structured, a little confusing, to us anyway.

Podcasting for Libraries..? It's an amazing medium, to be sure, and as an organisation looking for new ways to get our programs heard, podcasting with it's capacity to cover a diversity of topics, hence attract a wide audience, is the answer, e.g. author visits, book reviews, tutorials, audio books. The concept is simplicity itself; allow users to listen to exactly what they want, and where they want. The ability to time-shift information is increasingly desirable, people seem to have less time to 'visit the library'. If we can harness the power and flexibilty of a media such as podcasting we can reshape our library's landscape and meet the demands of our evolving community. P.H.,G.H.,C.R.