Summary: wow!

This was a very useful project. I learned a lot. I felt that I gained only a superficial understanding of the things we learned about, mostly because of the time constraints, but taking the first few steps are vitally important in making them less threatening and exposing myself to their usefulness and appeal. I thought all the subjects covered were interesting and useful. I would definitely take another course like this in the future.

I found that I needed to spend more than 1 1/2 hours each week to complete the exercises. Maybe the project should be spread over a longer time period.

Some of the instructions were cryptic. Adding a sentence or two might have helped. For example, the overview on podcasts did not emphasize that they are non-visual (or can they be?)

Overdrive audiobooks and Sirsi?

Whatever exercise we are doing, I always learn something useful. For instance, for this exercise I learned that Overdrive's collection includes language learning audiobooks. My overall impression of Overdrive is that their interface is well-designed and user friendly, such as marking titles that are permitted to be burned to CD and offering categories like newly arrived or recently returned.

Unfortunately, they don't seem to use Library of Congress subject headings, relying on keywords. They limit the search field "subject" to less than 50 subjects. This probably means we won't be able to add our audiobook collection to Sirsi -- or, if we actually can add them to our catalog, that when you do a subject search, audiobooks will not be included in the hit list. Things get ever more complicated.

Podcasted

I listened to an interview with David Sedaris which was sponsored and podcasted (can it be used as a verb?) by the Kankakee Public Library. (How does such an obscure sounding place get such a high-powered speaker?) Then using Podcast Alley I found an interesting subscription podcast called "The Unnamed Path," which promotes New Age spiritualism.

It was interesting that the Sedaris podcast did not require a podcast receiver. But, to listen to one of the 55 or so lectures on the Unnamed Path, I had to first download a receiver (I chose Juice) and then download the particular lecture I wanted to hear. So some podcasts are by subscription, and others are just parts of websites to be clicked on. I added the Unnamed Path to my bloglines account. Some of the 10 feeds from them turned out to be new podcasts, and some were just news and information and were not podcasts. As is typical of the Internet, nothing is neat and tidy and easily categorizable. Everything is mixed together and the whole is greater than the parts.

YouTube and slam poetry

There's quite a bit of slam poetry on YouTube. YouTube is a perfect medium for slam poetry -- performances just waiting to be filmed for their in-your-face attitude, the visuals, and the appreciative responses of the audiences. One I saw today is "Liking Me" by Sonya Renee, a runner up in the nationals. It's about having safe sex in a hip-hop culture that frowns upon it.

Some interesting features: YouTube allows you to save favorite videos in folders, which is convenient. The comment area is always interesting. The quality varies a lot -- but hey not everything has to be perfect to be appreciated.

Since sound is such an integral part to movies, we wouldn't want to put a video on the library's homepage. But I can imagine the library might create videos to be seen on YouTube, such as videos of our programs or special promotions. I don't think this is a very effective promotional avenue because YouTube reaches a national audience and is not limited to the local community. On the other hand, our video for the summer reading program has been viewed 409 times as of today -- not a bad number, considering. But I still think it would function better as a video archive.