Podcasting fun

We’ve heard a lot about pod-casting over the last year and Nancy and I spent a fun afternoon yesterday recording 2 for this project:

1) An audio induction to the library. This concentrates on the key messages we want to get across and we hope that in time it will reduce the need for doing endless tours and induction talks. A recent survey at Birmingham found that over half of our students now have ipods / MP3 players so it makes sense to start using this technology.

2) An audio guide to our elibrary service. This is our flagship service, providing access to all of our electronic journals and databases. Although use of this is high, there are still many students who use Google as a first port of call, so the idea of this podcast is to make elibrary use as simple and useful as possible to capture these students. We hope that students might listen to this while on their home PC and beginning to explore what’s available.

We will be recording our third podcast next week:

3) The student experience. Thanks to the Guild Officers who have agreed to participate and have some great tips for making best use of the library. Surveys have found that students are most likely to seek help from their friends / fellow students, so it makes sense to capture this and use it to promote the library / information literacy.
We’re using Camtasia software for this and learning it as we go along – quite a task and many a botched recording on the way! The software is really quite advanced so we hope to explore this further later in the term and enhance some of our recordings with music and better editing etc. We both love exploring new technology, but its important not to under-estimate the time it takes to really master and make best use of this type of software. The final challenge is how to make these downloadable from WebCT, so our next task is to consult with our elearning team to check this out.