librarian.net

Image from Radio Telephony, in the public domain

I was interviewed by Steve Thomas for his Circulating ideas podcast a few weeks ago and interviewed by Kayhan B., Erin Anderson and Doug Mirams for their Bibliotech podcast a week earlier. I don’t listen to many professional-type podcasts but both of these conversations were a really good chance to talk over some of the issues facing the profession today in addition to just me going “bla bla…” about myself. Both shows have had a host of other guests and I’ve been digging around in the archives finding other stuff to listen to. If you’re podcast-oriented, these are two shows to put in regular rotation.

For those of you who thrilled to Matthew Battles’ book Library: An Unquiet History should try out his podcast — similarly titled but not library-specific — Unquiet History. I’m currently enjoying listening to a short history of medeival urban garbage. Fun!

WNYC’s Selected Shorts program has done a podcast about libraries in celebration of Edith Wharton’s personal library collection’s return to The Mount. [direct download link 27MB] [thanks scott]

My article for Library Journal’s NetConnect called Saving Digital History about archiving digital content is available online. LJ has done something weird and terrible with their web layout so that it’s now somewhat broken in Firefox for Mac so my apologies for sending you to the so-called “print” version. I also got to talk to Jay Datema and Peter Brantley as part of the NetConnect podcast series. It’s a hefty 50MB download, but I thought it was a pretty good conversation that Jay did a great job annotating.

I got to talk to Dan Chudnov and Ross Singer in the second podcast in the library geeks series titled post-social. We talked about, um, computers, and MetaFilter and I honestly can’t hardly remember, but I’m going to go listen to it now. You can find it at geeks.onebiglibrary.net.

A podcast from my old Alma Mater. The Conviction of Michael Gorman: “Michael Gorman is a cultured and accomplished man who dares to speak his mind. Are his views intolerable?”

I sometimes have a hard time talking about technologies I don’t know much about. I can see things like cell phones in a professional context — library policy, kids IM on them, they’re good for updates — as well as in a personal context — I don’t have one, I can’t get service at my house, if I really wanted one, I would have one. I feel this way about podcasts as I’ve said before. I don’t listen much to radio shows, sometimes I feel like the only person of my political persuasion who isn’t an NPR junkie, so podcasting doesn’t appeal. On the other hand, the whole idea of personally created content appeals to me much the same way that zines do. How great is it to be able to produce your own radio show and immediately be able to distribute it internationally? Seems sort of great. With that in mind, I point you to InfoSpeak created by the tech-positive smarties at the University of Washington iSchool (yes I went there, no it wasn’t anything like this when I was there). It’s “student-produced serial media” which, yes, is a podcast, but if you don’t get the whole podcast blah blah blah, you can also just listen to it online, simple. First episode, one of my favorite talkers Joe Janes, iSchool prof and Google pundit talking about how Google is changing the way we work, among other things. Check out the links next to the description, that’s what I’d like to see from more podcasters. Happy inaugural podcast, iSchool! [thanks carolyn]

Hi. I was interviewed about the digital divide, camel librarians and the Gates Foundation on Moby Lives yesterday. You can grab the podcast here.

A few people had sent me a link to LibriVox before I left on the trip and it was in the queue to look at when I got back. I ran into Hugh McGuire at the Open Content Alliance Open Library Launch (his blog notes) and was happy to be able to say “Hey your link is in my inbox” and then get to talk to the man himself about the work that he does with group of dedicated volunteers. With a tagline like “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain” you’ve got to believe they have big plans. The specific project involves volunteers recording chapters of books and making the audio files available. The broader vision is to have “all books in the public domain to be available, for free, in audio format, on the internet.” You can have a copy of Call of the Wild to use however you want and whenever you want, thanks to LibriVox and the four volunteers who read and recorded the chapters. What are you waiting for, go volunteer to read something! Hugh is also on the board of Canda’s oldest lending library in case you were skeptical about his librarian cred.

Apparently today is Dictionary Day. Happy birthday Noah Webster. I am celebrating by subscribing to my first podcast called, appropriately enough Word Nerds.