Thing 21 - Podcasting (YouTube, Audacity and iTunes)

I'll be totally honest, to my great shame I knew very little about podcasts until a few months ago. Yes, I knew they existed out there and that various people (but who?...) used them, but more than that I hadn't got a clue. Didn't know exactly what they were not what they were for, and to my shame I never really took the time to investigate further.

... until I started singing lessons and my singing teacher was aghast that I didn't use YouTube to compare singers and performances. She pointed me in the direction of Sarah Connolly's incredible performance as Julius Caesar in Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto at Glyndebourne in 2005. It was love at first hearing! Sarah Connolly is indeed extraordinary, just see and listen to Va tacito e nascosto and Non è si vago e bello - oh, and Aure, deh, per pietà, it's heart-renderingly good! Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra is also well worth having a listen to, in V'adoro, pupille for example. And I can't not mention one of my absolute favourite arias, Sesto's Cara speme, by the fantastic Austrian mezzo Angelika Kirschlager. Truly superb! Goosebumps stuff! Oh, and one last one: the duet between Sesto and Cornelia, Son nata a lagrimar, 'I was born to cry'... Will it surprise you to hear that I went to Heffers Sound to buy the DVD that very lunchtime?

Anyway. Enough of all that. You may have guessed that since this YouTube revelation, I'd become a huge fan of podcasts in general, although since it's honesty hour I was extremely relieved to hear that we weren't required to create a podcast in order to "pass" Thing 21, just comment on them. Phew! I also realised while working on Thing 21 that I had at various times been sent links to podcasts and thoroughly enjoyed a lot of them... without even realising that that's what they were. Gnargh!

Since we were required to look at podcasts from the point of view of marketing libraries, I did of course look at (nearly) all of the ones recommended and in true 23 Things spirit have now subscribed to a few podcasts and started working my way through them all. I've explored podcasts as yet another current awareness tool that I'll be using long after the Cambridge 23 Things programme is over - and have a look at Audacity at that point. iTunes I do use already but to upload music I already own onto my mp3 player rather than to purchase, download or subscribe to anything new.

As for whether or not we'll create our own podcasts for our Faculty Library, I personally think it's way too early to tell. The medium clearly has a lot of potential for quick audio-guides for example, perhaps to complement existing print ones, or give virtual tours of the library. We however are not quite there yet. I'd rather be cautious about it at this point, since I am very aware that library podcasts, if not carefully crafted, all too easily fall into the "dad at the disco syndrome" that LottieMSmith mentioned in her post about Facebook: trying too hard to be trendy but in truth just awkward and cheesy and plain embarrassing. This will require a lot of work to get right, much more so than print resources or a new website, so podcasting is a Thing we'll bear in mind for the long-term future but not necessarily for the short to medium term.