Podcasts

I looked at Podcast Alley, and decided to browse, rather than search, topics. Naturally, I went to education, since that's what libraries tend to get lumped into. And what should I find but Grammar Girl. I frequently forget about Grammar Girl, and am always pleased when I find it again. I knew about the blog, but was not aware of the podcast. After listening to some episodes, I feel even better about "me." "Me" as in the objective first person pronoun that, between you and me, I believe is a perfectly good word.
Putting my inner grammarian back in her room, I did a keyword search of "library 2.0" (without the quotes) and found a lovely podcast about primary sources. There are differences in what constitutes a primary source depending on the subject. For example, a journal article is probably a primary source in science, and probably not a primary source in history. The podcast is from the Library Survival Guide at Emory University found here: http://guides.main.library.emory.edu/podcast.

YouTube

Well, having just said in my previous post that YouTube could be used for booktalks, I decided to look for booktalks on YouTube. Lo and behold, there are bunches! Many of them lack descriptive titles, simply calling themselves "book talk" or something similar, with no indication of what the subject of the book talk is. That wouldn't be so bad if the first sentence of the description says what it's about, but that isn't always the case either. Library Lowdown indicates the subject of the talk in the description, such as this one on books dealing with Antarctica. Cool.

Award Winning Web 2.0 Sites

Alas, BBC Player left me disappointed. While radio stations are available most places, video is only for those in the UK. Rights agreements. So, no free Dr. Who episodes for me.



One Sentence is cool. A complete story in only one sentence. My favorite is the person who sat on the grass near a rock. A rock that subsequently got up and walked off, showing itself to have been a bobcat in disguise. Some of the entries make me wonder why anyone would want the whole world to know about that. I can't think of a library use for this one.



I can think of uses for YouTube. No, it's not just a mindless time waster. There's good stuff on there. It could be a place to put tutorials or booktalks, or even do staff training. Instead of trying to catch everyone to update them on that cool new Sirsi feature, it could be posted to YouTube. There's always training at the annual Regional All Staff meetings, but they're on the same day, which means no-one can go to both. No problem, just record it and post it to YouTube. Of course, the training part assumes that one can set up a private channel.