RCPL Tech Challenge - Podcasting

I have been purposely avoiding podcasts for a long time because I was afraid that once I started, I’d become addicted – there are so many neat things to listen to! However, for the sake of this challenge, I took the plunge – I downloaded the weekly podcast by the writers of the show Grey’s Anatomy. I have an ipod and itunes installed on my computer, but decided to do this “outside” of the ipod environment. I expect that in the future I’ll probably use my itunes account/software to manage my podcast subscriptions. It was easy – and after listening to one episode of the “behind the scenes” information about the show – I’m hooked. So then, of course, I had to look at all the various knitting podcasts that are out there. I decided to start with KnitCast, which is one of the more established knitting podcasts – you can often hear authors and knit designers being interviewed about their latest books. And again, I became hooked. Am I going to listen to podcasts in the future? Oh yeah….. .

As with most of the other technologies we’ve looked at, there are lots of ways that RCPL could use podcasting – news, events and recordings of programs, for example – but what I’d really like to see is a weekly or monthly podcast from the Youth Services staff. I’m sure there would be copyright issues, and I don’t know how difficult that would be to overcome, but I really love the idea of being able to go to the website every week and download a new podcast of a staff member reading a children’s book. If the copyright issues were too much to deal with, then a weekly podcast of a staff member TELLING a story would be neat too (we already have something similar on the website, but it doesn't change). I think it would be a new way of providing the old "dial a story" option that my library did when I was a kid.