I had a great meeting last week with the Douglas County Library systems regarding the “content” that they produce. In my previous post What content did you create today – but threw away?! I discuss how all of us create content as we live our daily lives and with a very little amount of effort this content could be captured and shared with others. Granted, most of this daily life content isn’t interesting to a mass audience, but there is someone that it might be interesting to – so why not capture it and share it?! Millions of people do this every day with Flickr and other web 2.0 sharing services.
My meeting with the library explored the types of content that they capture and what they don’t capture. Specifically, I addressed issues around podcasting and how their programs (author presentations, story time, special events) could be shared with a larger audience via the time-shifting and place-shifting functions of podcasting. Think about how many wonderful programs your library puts together, but you don’t attend. Sometimes you have a scheduling conflict (the kids soccer game is at the same time an author is speaking) and other times you don’t know about a program until after the fact. There are even situations where a library program isn’t relevant for you today but could be very interesting in the future. This is where I think the podcasting of library programs could be beneficial.
I created a Keynote presentation (download PDF or Keynote Mac) to introduce the core ideas around podcasting (at a high level) and to begin the discussion. The meeting went very well and I have several follow-up items. Hopefully, you will soon see some podcasts from Douglas County Library :)
