I’m slowly catching up with everything again!
I’ve heard lots of good reports about Podcasts from various sites and I must say, I’ve always been impressed by the technology of it all! The readings this week have been very interesting and I particularly liked the idea of linking the library catalogue to Amazon to create a great mash-up! How much time this would save both us and the library user!
Whilst I’m developing an outreach service, I was already thinking of using a screen-capture tool such as Camtasia studio to provide online tutorials for the end user in how to use library services, for example, Dialog databases. Now that I have had a look at some of the podcasts available, it would be sensible to use a podcasting tool as the user would be able to carry the information around with them whereas screen capture would be limiting.
I visited the Johns Hopkins Medicine site and they provide updated podcasts on a weekly basis. The links are to the top medical stories of that week and are indexed by ‘time- lapsed’ so you can skip to the relevant section of the podcast as well as viewing an archive.
I then delved into podcast searching on the internet and whilst there were many pages and directories available to the end user, I struggled to find a useful podcast for specific interests and to be honest, my head was spinning by the time I had gone through so many different sites!
My conclusion though, is that I believe podcasts would be good in a specialist health library environment – especially used as a promotional tool for the library service. I will have to investigate adding this into the outreach library blog at the end of the course!
Interesting that you mentioned Camtasia. We are in the process of purchasing Camtasia at the moment. I have only had the opportunity to play with the demo, but it does look very interesting.
We aim to have a Library induction guide available to the students as a podcast for the September intake. I’m hoping to utilise it as a walk round guide for the podcast and also as a static windows media player file for pc access.
The package has been purchased for the University to work on the VLE, but I’m currently checking the licence to confirm whether or not I can eventually place items on the Library website for use by the NHS and students alike.
Our current issue is the storage of the files, hopefully by the end of the year there will be a central repository which mean I can create one file and link to many sites, instead of current procedure of multisite updating.
I have no experience of ipods, mainly on the grounds I dislike technology that is so channelled with it’s own format. Unfortunately it means I need to do a bit of research to check the full range of possibilities.
Karen’s point about the portability of a podcast is interesting. It puts me in mind of exhibition aural guides, which are linked via (radio signal, WiFi, RFID?) to hot spots at different points in the exhibition). There is an example in action at the Bayeux Tapestry http://www.tapisserie-bayeux.fr/index.php?id=museetapisserie
Both Karen and Susan mention Camtasia. That was purchased here in Barbara Bolton’s time, but we are now reviewing whether we stick with that or whether to go forward using Moodle. It will be interesting to see where the momentum builds up around these products.
Colin