NSW Public Libraries - Week 9

I had a look at the range of podcasts available from the British Library and listened to the Gaiman-Waugh podcast which was very interesting as it described how the content of the CD included recordings of the author through different stages of their life.
On the ABC I searched through the subjects and listened to The Book Show which is aired on ABC Radio National, I listened to the episode from Thursday April 10th 2008. The preview of There will be blood sounded very dramatic!

When I looked at the Library Success wiki I was a bit surprised by the number of podcasts already there and the range of topics they covered. I listened to the BookTalks Quick and Simple, I selected the Artemis Fowl: the Arctic Incident and listened to the talk. It was very well presented with clear speech and voices for the characters. I thoroughly enjoyed this podcast.

Within our library I can see alot of potential for podcasts, bookgroup meetings could be podcast to give other patrons a review of a book. You could also podcast the reading of a childrens book to provide an online storytime.
Although I can see alot of use for podcasts I would be reluctant to use it with staff as I feel it is important to keep the face to face contact, using the podcast to support this contact would be great but it would need to be kept as a secondary means of communication and not used as the primary means of communication.

I had a look at the Online Education Database and there are podcasts for almost any topic you wish to learn. I listened to a Yale Course - Death (Spring 07) - Nature of Persons. The podcast provided the information for learning and is a great way for students that are studying externally to listen to lectures and material that they may not otherwise get access to.

I also performed a Yahoo Podcast search for library, although I received 1082 results there was very little information with the results and I found that most had no relation to library. More refined searching is probably the key with this search engine.