Without further ado:

Google’s Picasa photo organization suite is quite nice, although not the sort of thing I’d bother with normally. The photo viewer app that installs with it and overrides the default Windows program, however, is suuuuper classy, and absolutely everyone ought to be using it.

PureText is 90′s freeware at heart, and accordingly, hasn’t been updated in years, but is it ever a charm. It runs in the background, and adds a key shortcut to strip out rich formatting from clipboard text, so you can copy web content into Word without having to use Notepad as an intermediary.

Launchy is a cross-platform “Keystroke Launcher” akin to Quicksilver on OSX, which indexes your installed programs and lets you open Photoshop by typing “Pho” from a shortcut text prompt — autosuggesting the program in question before you develop the faintest craving for Sriracha.

ffdshow is the only video decompression pack worth using, usually associated with the open-source VLC player. In fact, it works with any video player, and better than absolutely anything else out there; just remember to download it from someplace other than Sourceforge, which hosts an out-of-date build.

If you’re still on XP, ISO Recorder does exactly what it says, and adds ISO burning capabilities (which are supported natively in Windows 7) to the Windows shell with unimaginably little fuss. Here’s looking at you, luddite sysadmins.

Finally, 7zip is adorably, paradoxically, an open-source compression utility built exclusively for Windows, featuring the best such algorithm in regular use, and expertly taking the place of whatever broken shareware you’ve been using for this purpose since 1997 (when WinZip, god bless its little heart, politely mentioned that its trial period had ended while still providing full functionality).

In conclusion, don’t buy a Mac and pretend it’s solved every problem you didn’t know you had — Steve Jobs is a pretentious jerk. Just because Gnome looks like somebody really loved OS9 and KDE keeps ripping off the worst parts of Windows and xfce effectively makes you feel like you were too cheap for OSX doesn’t mean that you need to give your money to this man.

(not you, Ballmer. I love you, Ballmer.)

Technically speaking, the British Library, the Library of Alexandria, and Borges’ Library of Babel are probably in the lead for sheer mythical stature. The Library of Congress, however, has some mean subject headings to its name. More importantly, its appeal to me as a blindly, violently patriotic American can not be overstated. I was delighted to learn that they feature a regular podcast, and can think of no better way to round out my short tenure at this blog than by exploring it in depth.

Now, for the dichotomy I’ve set up between “general interest” and “about the library” in prior posts, take note: this is, resoundingly, NPR stuff. Though it goes without saying that I would not at all mind a “history of the Library of Congress” series, the current offerings are exceptionally well-produced.

What they are not, as yet, is unique. Up to late last year (curiously around the same time as a certain president became elect), the only audio hosted here consisted of author interviews from the 2007 and 2008 National Book Festivals; certainly nice, in that you can get your Junot Diaz and your Jodi Picoult in the same broadcast, but otherwise hardly comparable to the material that the Moth or the New Yorker serve up in a given week.

In the meantime, the LoC has waded into some more adventurous waters. Alongside the 2009 Book Festival, they’ve launched a series on Slave Narratives, as well as another entitled “Music and the Brain.” While it’s not immediately clear in what respect the library is tapping into their (virtually unlimited) archives, they do seem to command a diverse range of expert narrators, giving the whole production a “writer-in-residence” feel.

Also, at one point, the narrator introduces his guest via the man’s Wikipedia credentials, which sets a rather hilarious precedent (and gets him a big thumbs-up in my book).

What’s most interesting to me, as a grasping attempt at a takeaway for this blog, is how little “library” so many of these programs have in them. While academic libraries in particular seem to lie on the opposite end of that spectrum, Sunnyvale and even Cornell are remarkable basically for how well they provide general-interest stories. Here we see the Library of Congress, capable of serving up virtually any information imaginable, opting to focus on any odd chapter. Might we say, broadly, that for all intents and purposes everyone’s got the same unlimited resources, and it’s only ever a matter of what we find the enthusiasm to record?

I’m going to enjoy tomorrow’s commute, at any rate.

I thought I’d pop back in for one more quick post, as we near the end of our time together. Because I’m sure you’re as eager as I am for me to double back home to lovely (read: nepotistic) Connecticut, I give you the Fairfield University library podcast. Like Arizona State’s “Library Minute” series, most of these are designed to advocate and explain the library’s various services. Where ASU was puzzling, however, Fairfield is a veritable wunderkammer of “what is going on here?” To wit:

1. The two formats that podcasts are distributed in are iTunes and RealPlayer. There is even a friendly link to download the latter, in case you uninstalled it in 1999.
2. Various journal databases (e.g. Academic OneFile) have been personified via some dress-up doll software, with the resultant image posted alongside the relevant podcast link.
3. Each of these podcasts are presented as an interview with the particular database.
4. Rather than the blogroll used by most podcasts we’ve seen up to now, these are just up and listed on one very long page. It might’ve been updated last week, or two years ago.

Fairfield, I think I love this. I haven’t any idea what it is or how it happened.

I must say that after six posts, I feel like we’ve laid the groundwork pretty well for what’s to be expected from these podcasts. We’ve discussed RSS syndication vs. iTunes, audio vs. video, and how podcasting can act as a microcosm of digital collections. In other words, it’s now time for something completely different.

(Incidentally, I’m watching the new Monty Python documentary, “Almost the Truth,” while I write this, and although there’s not a lot of new material, late-60s John Cleese and Michael Palin are just as entertaining as late-20s Pythons from where I’m standing.)

In the interest of not going progressively further off track with each post, however, I am now going to shout some key words at you.

SILVERLIGHT!

LAW LIBRARIES!

OREGON!

Are you properly excited yet? Good!

Now hang on to your cortisol levels, Batman, because things are about to get intelligible.

Sorry – I’m really losing it here, I know. Without further ado: The Paul L. Boley Law Library at Lewis and Clark University in Oregon maintains a very professional and regularly updated blog which, while broadly classed under “podcasts,” takes a cue from Arizona State in offering video more often than not. Of greater curiosity is the platform by which they offer these lectures snippets: one Microsoft Silverlight.

Silverlight, for the uninitiated, is (more or less) a Flash competitor that Microsoft tried to get folks excited about a year or two ago when it was demoing the various ways in which you could play table tennis with your fingers in Windows 7.  It’s more efficient than Flash — anything is — and the interface is relatively slick, insofar as it looks like something Apple designed. Unfortunately, however, Apple did not design it, and as such, nobody knew quite what to make of it; if YouTube were willing to migrate the entirety of their content to a Microsoft platform, they might just be in business, but of course that’s patently absurd.

In addition to Lewis and Clark’s featuring the only large-scale implementation I’ve seen of a universally ignored platform, it’s also a pretty neat paradigmatic case of a special library podcast. Law libraries being the nominal “stars” of the Special Library Association (soon to be renamed AskPRO, as the hegemonic dominance via friendly acronyms by information professionals who despise the word “library” continues), private sector news is still usually confined to institutional correspondence, and so an academic law library makes for a very nice peek inside.

That said, Anali Perry, vodcaster extraordinaire, is a hero.

In addition to saving the world, she’s the Assistant Collections and Scholarly Communications librarian at Arizona State University, from which she hosts the Library Minute video series regularly posted to their library’s blog, and which I cordially invite you to view after the jump.

Yes, they all have that hilariously quaint “local news broadcast” feel to them. Yes, these are linked from the front page of the library’s website. Yes, they do podcasts too, for example this nice little interview transcript from the recent Open Access Week goings-on.

Admittedly, the valuable piece here is probably the blog itself, if not for which The Library Minute wouldn’t have much of an audience outside of the still-marginalized pool of YouTube subscribers. Of course, I’m not sure why this should be, other than because Apple hasn’t established a neat, elegant, two-click delivery mechanism for minute-long free content as such. I can’t shake the feeling myself that these would be better broadcast at intervals around campus than made to round out some impossibly personable web library communique; they’re so well-produced, and yet such an odd duck.

It really makes one wonder at the extent to which Web 2.0 content has been codified already, and whether walls have gone up in the past five or so years such that these playful little commercials find themselves without a niche to squeeze into (as that’s really what they are, the fact that they advertise a free service notwithstanding). I can’t claim to know very much about the demographic of Arizona State University, but my first question remains: who watches these?

My second question: who wouldn’t?

Can I talk for just a minute about how much I love CamelCase type (as per the title of this entry, or, dare I say it, case in point)? Being somebody who works with neither NaCl, nor EnvVars, nor even iPods, I am not exactly predisposed to loving it. Frankly, I didn’t have any idea that it was called CamelCase until I looked it up just now. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s overused, and I’m sure graphic designers would be sick to death of it were it not such an elegant panacea. I still think it’s the bees’ knees.

Oh oh oh and incidentally! Every time I hear the word “panacea,” as well as “innate” or “carapace,” I’m reminded of the fact that I learned all three from the same videogame, and happened to run into them simultaneously in one vocab quiz in tenth grade. A life well wasted, indeed.

With all of that out of the way, let’s get started, mm?

Having pretty well tackled three rather different examples of public library podcasts in my earlier posts, I’m going to move on to academic libraries for now. For starters, let’s look at everyone’s favorite fake Ivy: Cornell University!

(I can be falsely derisive like that because I grew up in New England, but I digress.)

Cornell has coined the term “LibeCast” for their “audio and video recordings about Cornell University Library and its exhibitions, events, lectures and services, offering the world a glimpse of life inside one of the nation’s best research libraries.” For the second time in two days, I’m extraordinarily impressed by the sheer variety of general-interest knowledge on offer here — thanks, I imagine, to Cornell’s impressive stable of lecturers. Speaking as somebody who’s previously been bored enough to comb over years’ worth of “best podcast” awards, it’s a mystery to me why academic libraries aren’t typically included if they’re of even a fraction of this quality on average.

LibeCasts aren’t dated on the front page (though dates are provided after their respective jump links), only listed in what might as well be chronological order. While not an extraordinarily interesting design decision, it is unique, and as long as this metadata is available elsewhere, it has a certain elegance about it.

A fair half of the LibeCast links contain video as well as audio, but only some of these have a separate audio-only link. Similarly inconsistent is a handful of recordings’ linking to the Mann Life Sciences library podcasts; some are cross-listed, but fewer are cross-hosted. In spite of these small niggles, however, Cornell is making a terrific case for advertising by way of digitizing content. And worry not — there is not one, but a series of “about the library” episodes.

I’m going to do my best not to get carried away this time. For those of you who are just joining me, I spent my last entry talking about Denver Public, after announcing at the start that I was going to share some thoughts on the Sunnyville Public Library podcasts which I never got around to. Thus, without any further ado:

The title of this entry may be meant as a joke, but Sunnyvale’s Bay Area credentials remain immediately evident on noticing that the podcast digest URL is “librarypodcasts.org.” While it’s not as though bookmarking a longer address is especially difficult, it still stands to reason that these guys were probably very near the first to begin delivering content like this. Equally telling is the absence of any design credit at the bottom of the page beyond “© 2006 City of Sunnyvale, California.” This layout seems to have been built in-house, the merits of which are debatable (see again my last entry), though the implication that the creative force actually knows what they are doing is invaluable.

Although they only seem to publish once a month on average, and have been mute since June of this year, the general interest content on offer from Sunnyvale is largely spectacular. It’s predominantly local, as well; if the library offers a public seminar on money matters, or a notable guest lecturer stops by, the recording makes its way to this website, usually clocking in between one and two hours. Entries are tagged either as children’s or adult, with the occasional video broadcast, and the right-hand column suggests a teen services category which doesn’t appear to be used. Each mp3-format podcast has an embedded flash player below its synopsis on the front page, as well as a direct download link, and the rightmost column includes both an RSS feed and an iTunes subscription.

Though I’ve already said as much, these are some extremely high-quality shows. While only being incidentally related to the library, they do an excellent job of showing, rather than telling, what’s going on in the Sunnyvale community, and the recording is quite professionally done. I think there exists a stigma which suggests that a library podcast can only be book readings or library-related news. Sunnyvale pierces right through that with what is essentially NPR material.

For the record, amidst the ongoing debate about the degradation of the public library, I don’t see any problem at all with Sunnyvale’s initiative. Breaking down the divide between libraries and community centers has only been a good thing up to now, and this is no different.

Interestingly enough, the link to sunnyvalelibrary.org available from the sidebar instead redirects to a rather unfortunate-looking .gov domain whose broken CSS is only sort-of apologized for by the assurance that the site will look much better in Internet Explorer 5. This, the library’s primary website, is yet among the best I’ve ever seen, offering several events to take place this week as well as a public service announcement about RFID on the front page. It’s clear, meanwhile, that the layout itself is caught up in some bureaucratic purgatory which prevents the aforementioned enterprising webmaster from doing justice to its content.

Today, I’ve got two more public libraries to discuss –both of which, I’m happy to say, trump Manchester by degrees. First, I’ll be talking about the Denver Public Library, whose podcast is targeted directly at the children’s department. After that, I’ll share what I think must be a well-kept secret: the podcast of the Sunnyvale Public Library. With a URL as iconic as librarypodcasts.org, the safest town in California led me to expect great things and did not disappoint, serving up content from visiting authors which rivals that of the excellent nearby FORA.tv series. But more on that later.

The Denver Public Library podcasts (subtitle: “Stories For Kids!”) are presented in a nice, readable blog digest format, with a very manageable seven tags and three external links, along with a full-text search, in the right column. The entries themselves are exclusively book readings, occasionally by the original author, along with a cover thumbnail, a cute little tagline, and copyright information. Production values are high, and because the speaker is either a children’s author or a children’s librarian, they’re very pleasant to listen to.

Not being able to identify a commercial-looking layout, I doubled down to the bottom of the page to discover a link to Liberated Syndication, a podcast-oriented CMS with hosting packages which range from $5-$60/month based on the amount of storage provided. Interestingly, they advertise that bandwidth is unmetered — strange, given that this is the main obstacle faced by many popular free podcasts. While I imagine that there is some level beyond which they’d have to renegotiate those terms, they seem to’ve been popular enough to merit mention in an actual book from as far back as 2005. I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of them.

Now, I wonder about the extent to which this is used by Denver Public. My assumption is that the average library’s hosting needs are quite modest, and this service might be the logical next step when going to a podcast. The second most inexpensive hosting option allows for 250MB of uploads each month for only $12, and assuming you’re recording in 64kbps mp3 (which is terrible for music, but fine for speech), that’s eight hours of content — not a limit you’re likely to eclipse for less than it costs to employ a page for two hours.

On the other hand, I wonder whether a paid service is even necessary. I’d hope that somebody in the chain of command at such a relatively high-profile public library as Denver would know enough to install WordPress, if not a more sophisticated CMS like Joomla or Drupal (though I, like Nicole Engard, am of the opinion that the former meets most needs just fine, and is unfairly passed over as a blogging-only platform). As more libraries move to this digest model, enforcing the value of rotating exhibitions over static collections, we’re going to see smaller and smaller operations taking on this challenge. Still, homegrown solutions may prove less viable; know-how costs more than Liberated Syndication.

Oops – I got going for a while on that one. What do you say we leave Sunnyvale to the next post?

(Incidentally, this is why I like blogging – any other medium, and I’d have to go and edit the first paragraph. Here’s, it’s a happily misintentioned “stay tuned”!)

To inaugurate this blog, I thought I’d get started by talking about some public library podcasting initiatives. No sooner had I opened up the “Podcasts” page of Librarysuccess.org than I noticed that the Manchester, CT public library, ten minutes from my childhood home, had (to my admitted surprise) joined the 21st century with a teen services podcast. I clicked onward.

Now, a word or two about Manchester seems appropriate here. It’s a relatively sprawling suburb, home to one of the larger shopping centers in eastern Connecticut at one end, and a beautifully-preserved quaint New England main street facade at another. Perhaps because it’s been so selectively developed, it’s also one of relatively few Connecticut towns that have been able to avoid outright white flight without turning into a commuters’ slum. Everyone who lives near Manchester drives through part of the town at least daily, yet nobody seems to know quite how to get from the mall to the Salvation Army without getting on the highway. The locals, meanwhile, have a notably less-developed vocabulary of Ivy League schools than most of their neighbors, but seem to enjoy quite pleasant lives all the same.

All of this sociological profile is to say that it’s a very ordinary American town in a part of the country which is often thought to be quite short on normalcy. As such, it’s home to a great many teens who could benefit a great deal from a good public library. The podcast, however, is — to put it mildly — all over the place. It’s available via both FeedBurner (an RSS standard, distributed in .mp3) and iTunes, which shows professionalism and versatility; while this isn’t so much laudable as it would be an unacceptable omission, so far so good.

From here, things get questionable. An average descriptor tag reads:

“ed babbles a bit about the Summer Reading Program here at MPL the home of summer reading – booshanka!!/”

The recordings themselves seem to be very much in the “by kids, for kids” vein. They range in length from less than a minute to upwards of 10 for the most recent, recorded in January of 2007 and apparently abandoned since. Each is read by a different library patron, which is a nice step toward community involvement, irrespective of whether a given reader speaks clearly enough to be heard. Although there seems to be some basic noise canceling at work, these clips are only nominally “produced” — they sound, in other words, exactly like public television.

Should this be counted as a failure of a well-meaning, no doubt underfunded public library? There definitely seems to be more wrong here than right, not least of which being the nearly three-year absence of any new content, scarcely a year after the podcast began. Ignoring that, there seems to be a gaping absence of a librarian’s guiding hand. I’m not asking for much, but any cataloging or production values are really nonexistent. The idea of kids walking into a recording studio, talking for a couple of minutes, then uploading and tagging their own content notwithstanding, this raises some questions about what a librarian’s role might be in this context. Autonomy for teens is a good thing, but the audience here definitely skews younger, such that I’m wondering how many actually managed to tune in. The teen services website, while by no means easy on the eyes, is at least partially up-to-date, making that “podcast” link stand out all the more.

Three years ago, this probably seemed like a proactive item on a checklist. Now, it’s clear that it really didn’t work. Hopefully, things will improve from here!

I do.

I sure didn’t think I would! I don’t like iPods or a whole lot of talk radio, so my chances weren’t the greatest.

Once upon a time, though, it came to pass that I wanted something other than music to fill my daily commute – trying to juggle my netbook on the bus in order to read some previously-opened New Yorker articles notwithstanding as a solution.

It occurs to me, of course, that this is yet another way of me trying to make my day even more hyper-efficient. Inasmuch as I’d rather get the news through a healthy filter of sarcasm in time that I’d previously spent listening to music and daydreaming –

– have you heard David Sedaris’ radio voice? Really, have you?

I know he jokes about not being able to understand why people pay to go see him, but, really, I don’t know why people pay to go see him. He got started doing live recordings on NPR’s This American Life, and the written word has only ever been a comedown since then.

But I digress. What I’m trying to say is that, as somebody who intrinsically fears efficiency in spite of pursuing it with a neurotic vengeance, and as someone who is intrinsically too cheap and too DIY-obsessed to ever buy a “pod” preceded by a lower-case vowel of any shape or size, I think that “podcasts” are a pretty snappy coinage, and I really enjoy listening to them on my off-brand phone, with my off-brand headphones and my off-brand 8GB microSD card (which I think I paid twelve dollars for).

Because I am an aspiring librarian, and because I’ve already knocked out a solid half of my other interests above, this blog is going to be devoted to library podcasts. I am going in blind, expecting the worst; after all, I treasure these things for their anecdotalism, and librarians, bless their hearts, often have every reason to put forth an impartial, informative dispatch.

None of this matters.

Excelsior!

Oh, and before I forget — in case you were wondering about the faux-German title, you should know that I did my undergrad in linguistics. All English-native linguists think that German is absolutely hilarious. I do too.