Thing 13: Podcasts

Podcasts are like radio shows that you can listen to whenever you want. There are podcasts about just about everything and I worked with them a great deal when I was studying Japanese. Since anyone with a microphone can make a podcast, there are many to choose from.

Most of the podcasts I have listened to were for practicing foreign languages. A particularly useful one was called JPod101. It was a weekly podcast that helped the listener understand a dialogue. I found it was very helpful because I had no other reliable method of listening to Japanese speech, seeing as I lived in Green Bay, Wisconsin at the time.

Another great thing about podcasts is that most of them are free. Podcasts can be quite entertaining and I listened to many over the summer when my job consisted solely of shelving books for 8 hours a day. I find it's easy to find interviews with celebrities you like. For example, I have a ton of Anthony Bourdain interviews from different podcasts.

Though I enjoy NPR, I can't think of many people my age who do. Podcasts seem to have taken the place of talk radio for my generation, and I suspect that will be the case for future generations as well.

Thing 12: Videos

So YouTube has been around for a while, and most people have found it to be entertaining if nothing else. But I think it is good to think of how libraries may use it. Just as libraries have their own website, many have their own YouTube channel. Through their channel they can promote new features of the library, post recordings of public workshops, and present answers/tutorials for frequently asked questions. It is much easier to show someone how to use a database than it is to tell them, and YouTube allows a library to do this 24 hours a day.

Here's a video I found about libraries and the future of print materials:



Joking aside, there are plenty of educational videos posted by libraries. University of Washington has a nice page which gives tours of their libraries and teaches new users the basics of using them. They are both informative and fun! Here's one:

Thing 11: Photo Fun

The point of Thing 11 is to get us to explore some of the easy photo editors/generators. These are fun little tools that allow you to easily make cool signs or add some flair to a web page. Half the fun of these was simply looking at all the available options. I'm sure I have seen some of these used on Facebook and in other social contexts but they could also be useful for libraries. I can see these being particularly useful for marketing purposes. These kinds of signs/fonts grab someone's attention much better than a simple bold font MS Word page would. Take the one I made, for example:

Thing 10: Images and Photos

The website Flickr allows us to post photos and tag them for others to search for. There also seems to be a lot of groups that post pictures of a certain theme (silly cats for example).

I have a strange fascination with blacksmithing so I chose that as my search term. This brought up many pictures of old men in overalls. I wanted something a little more in line with my glorified idea of blacksmiths. Luckily you can refine your search to "interesting" photos. I don't know exactly what Flickr means by "interesting" but it helped me find what I was looking for.

http://flic.kr/p/ahxwGh
http://flic.kr/p/7yDAkY

Another interesting feature of Flickr is their privacy settings. This allows you to limit who may see your photos. Privacy on the internet is a big concern and having these options makes it easier to post photos that you may not want everybody to have access to.

Thing 9: Tagging

I had never seen a website like Delicious until now and I wish I had sooner. I have found it to be a great tool for exploring things I am completely unfamiliar with. Let me give you an example: I am interested in exotic foods. Now I could easily conduct a search about this through any number of sites, but the results I get are likely to be very different. This is because search engines will use some kind of "relevance algorithm" to determine which sites (that they search) are most pertinent to my search. Delicious, on the other hand, relies on user feedback to display its results.

If someone tags a site with the terms "Japanese" and "food" then it will be displayed on my results page. I can then see how popular the results were by seeing how many users "saved" that page. If a site has thousands of "saves" it may be safe to assume that it is quite relevant to those tags assigned to it.

If an expert in a certain field tags a site it is very much like receiving her advice that the site is relevant and/or useful. We cannot know for sure who did the tagging but it would be very easy for collaborating researchers to tag sites in a recognizable way, allowing them to basically communicate. For example: If two researchers were working on a project they could agree to tag all relevant websites a certain way. Then they could search that tag later and easily retrieve them.