The value of podcasts for libraries

There are lots of different ways that libraries can use podcasts, some of which I have direct experience in.

Over the summer, I worked at the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) as a reference librarian. Every day, a newsletter was published of the top electronic stories, called Smartbrief, and was e-mailed to internal and external customers. The library, along with other departments, took turns making audio posts of these newsletters for those unable to read the print-version. It involved taking all of the stories and figuring out which to keep, and which to take out. It also required you to prepare a script and decide exactly what you were going to say before you started recording. Luckily, CEA had lots of professional equipment, so the podcasts came out sounding very nice – although we did use Audacity, as well, to edit them.

Libraries can use podcasts for other things too, such as a spotlight on a new database/resource or a list of upcoming events. They can also do interviews with other librarians and staff members. The possibilities are endless. I do think that whatever information is presented in the podcast should be duplicated somewhere else in written form. For instance, if a library did create a podcast of upcoming events or highlighted a database, they should also put these somewhere on the website for others to see. While podcasts can help reach a larger audience, it is important to remember that not everyone is able to (or wants to) play audio files to listen to information.

Podcasts are definitely beneficial to libraries, but it is important to recognize that they take a LOT of work. A podcast may only take 3 minutes to listen to, but at the minimum, may take an hour (or more) to create when you factor in researching, scripting, recording, and editing, and publishing. The podcasts for CEA were about 4-7 minutes in length and took me about 2 hours from start-to-finish to create. Management must understand that podcasts are valuable, but take a lot of time and are not just a “five minute procedure”. I compare it a lot to technical writing, which I used to do. Instructions may take someone two or three minutes to read through, but a document could take hours or days to write!


Another drawback/consideration to podcasts is that audio files take up a lot more space than a basic webpage. It is important the library understand their resources available and understand if they are able to host the files without a problem. 

Life on a Cruise Ship Podcast

Click here to listen to my podcast about life on a cruise ship. I created this podcast since I would hear the same questions asked over and over again when I worked on a cruise ship. I would often joke that it felt like the movie “Groundhog Day”, where Bill Murray has to live the same day over and over. Find the answers to such burning questions as "Who would want to take computer classes on a cruise ship?" and "What are crew cabins like?" 

For this podcast, I took the top 4 questions I would often get asked. I tried to make the podcast a little campy to evoke that “cruise director” feel. I also had fun using the “echo” function in Audacity to help introduce each question. There are definitely more questions I could answer and more information that I could share regarding cruise ship life. These could be addressed in later podcast episodes, if I were to continue it.

PowerPoint vs. Prezi

For our most recent assignment, we were asked to create a presentation in both PowerPoint and Prezi, and compare our experiences with the two.

I’ve used PowerPoint for over ten years, but it’s often been for presentations where I am the speaker and the slides serve as my key points. I’m sure we’ve all seen the presenters that user PowerPoint for all their notes and basically just read off the slide; the result is too much text and we all have a hard time following along. Presentations like these give PowerPoint a bad reputation, since I think it can be a very valuable tool, especially when the presenter uses text, images, and animations effectively. PowerPoint can be complex at times, too, but I think they’ve done a good job in later versions about letting people create quality and professional looking presentations without too much hassle.

I do not have as much experience using PowerPoint as a standalone presentation tool. I enjoyed this aspect, too, especially learning how to include the next, previous, and back to first slide buttons.

Prior to the assignment, I had never heard of Prezi, so I was intrigued to go about exploring it. While I can see the appeal of Prezi for some people, I found the concept as a whole extremely frustrating, especially as a long-time user of Powerpoint. I found the process of inserting text and images to be quite a hassle, and it was not always easy for me to resize or control the objects as I would like. Finding pictures was incredibly difficult and I think it’s much easier to find images using Microsoft’s built-in image finder. I was also disappointed with the lack of features compared to PowerPoint, such as action buttons or animation.

I will say that I thought Prezi was a very interesting concept. I liked the idea of how everything is one big whiteboard and you can zoom in/out and move around as you’d like. I can definitely see the appeal of Prezi for someone who does not like PowerPoint or is intimidated by it. I would not, however, recommend Prezi to someone like me who is comfortable using a good chunk of PowerPoint features, already.

After this assignment, I still think PowerPoint is the best for “speaker assisted” presentations. You can do so much more with it, and it’s much better for someone who wants complete control over their presentation. Even if I was asked to create a standalone presentation with no speaker, I would still use PowerPoint. I may, however, consider investigating other online presentation tools to see if they serve me any better.