Apple has released iTunes U, which will allow any college or university to set up a customized portion of the iTunes Music Store to distribute course content and other audio and video material. The free service will let institutions limit use of some materials to certain people and make other content available to all.

Universities and colleges must enter into an iTunes U service agreement to be eligible to participate. Participating colleges and Universities will be given software tools that will make it easy for professors or students to upload content to iTunes. The files will be stored on servers run by Apple. University and college administrators will have control over who can see the files and they will be able to integrate the system with their existing network software so that students can log into the iTunes store using their campus user ID's and passwords.

This past year six institutions have worked with Apple testing this service: Brown, Duke, Stanford Universities, University of Michigan School of Dentistry, University of Missouri School of Journalism and University of Wisconsin at Madison.

"Coursecasting" has become very popular in the academic world, students are able to listen to recordings of class lectures on their portable music players.

Michigan's dentistry school uses the iTunes service to deliver recordings of most of the school's courses.

Lynn Johnson, associate professor of dentistry and director of dental informatics, says the idea to offer recordings of lectures came from the students, who volunteered to help make the recordings. At first, the dental school set up its own Web site to distribute the recordings, but it recently switched to the iTunes service instead, says Ms. Johnson. "They really needed and wanted the audio because they could be mobile with it," she says. She says that the project is a success, and that many students use it. Student volunteers are in charge of starting and stopping the recording process for each lecture, using a Macintosh computer that is tied into the classroom's sound system. "The fact that they keep recording more lectures -- that just speaks for itself," she says.

It is important to know schools that subscribe to the iTunes U service will be essentially "choosing" the MP3 player their students must use. While podcasts can be listened to by anybody with a MP3 playing devices, iTunes only works with iPods.

This could be very exciting for medical schools and medical libraries within the medical schools. Eventually will iTunes U be a linked on the subscribing institution's library page? In cases like Michigan's dentistry school where students are recording class lectures, why not?! After all campus libraries used to be the repository for class lectures on tape, why not link to the class lectures online? One could take it a step further, list the current day or weeks worth of podcasts on an RSS feed on the library website (depends on how many podcasts you have) . Or perhaps have a website with the course lectures and a list additional resources (books, journals, articles, presentations, websites).

Librarians, think and be creative. iTunes U and podcasting may be a little bumpy and still futuristic, but it is gaining popularity and momentum. I am not telling you when and where you should get on the train, just do not let it pass you by.