I read two articles yesterday about podcasting and I am currently editing and putting the finishing touches on an article on podcasts that I am submitting to MRSQ. So, podcasts have kind of been on my mind lately. Bye the way, I know I am woefully overdue in updating my podcast list, sorry but some personal and professional things kind of delayed that. I will get back on it in a month or two.

Michael Lorenzen's The Information Literacy Land of Confusion blog refers to the BBC article Podcast lectures for uni students, and mentions exploring and adding podcasting to the range of library instruction tools. The Online Learning Update blog by Ray Schroeder refers to an ABC news item where NCCU Hands out iPods to professors with the goal to teach the teachers how to podcast and allow students to download the lectures.

It seems that everybody (myself included) is podcast crazy. But it also seems that a majority of the people, institutions, organizations, and companies are overly focused on CREATING podcasts in an attempt to reach out to anybody who might ever think about wanting to listen. People and places are slapping up podcasts faster than gas prices are rising without a care as to whether or not the people even care or feel they have a need for that podcast. It doesn't seem to matter how big or small the number of people they reach, just if they reach somebody somewhere. It is almost as if people are suffering from the Field of Dreams of podcasting, "If you build it they will come." This is similar to the same phenomenon we saw when blogs hit the Internet. Everybody HAD to have a blog. Let's not think about content, potential users, updating, and whether it is even necessary for the situation. WE NEED A BLOG, make a blog. Think of the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert. We need a podcast, create a podcast!!!!!!

While I agree the right podcasts are great resources or fun things to listen to, but why aren't there more libraries or librarians ORGANIZING podcasts or looking at ways of making them easier for the patrons to FIND?!?! The Chronicle of Higher Education article Lectures on the Go states, "For years, students at Purdue who missed an important class headed off to the campus library, where up to date cassette recordings of more than 90 courses sat waiting to be checked out. But this fall, Purdue's podcasting project, called BoilerCast, is letting students skip the library." Ok am I the only one that read this line and heard the sound of nails down the blackboard?! Don't get me wrong I am not one of those librarians who thinks students need to be physically in the library to be using its resources, but are libraries losing out by not organizing or creating podcast repositories?!

One of the biggest frustrations I have had with finding medical podcasts is that there is no really good search engine that indexes podcasts. You can browse through general subject lists which are large and full of programs that you would have never thought appropriate for the subject. For example, why is something called Acoustic Fuel listed under the Health subheading?! Or you can try keyword searching, however a keyword search is only as good as the search engine and the information that it is searching. Podcast search engines search for things either by the podcast's metadata and headlines or by converting the audio program to text. Well, if your search engine looks at the metadata and headlines, things like the Harvard Heart Letter podcast which gives no information (no title, no program, no speaker, etc.) will not be retrieved. If your search engine converts the audio program to text then you are essentially doing rudimentary keyword search in a full text database which can lead to a lot of junk results.

Librarians are great at finding, organizing, and making things available to their patrons. So why aren't more libraries or librarians looking at organizing or developing methods to finding podcasts for their patrons rather than adding to the mess of audio programs already out there? Where are the really techie librarians, ones that can program and create databases? Where are they in the podcasting sea of information? Yeah, it is great that you created a library podcast on how to use the library, but are you winning the battle only to lose the war? Why is it that students are going to a web page that the IT department created, organized, set up to get course reserves instead of the library? Why didn't the library think to work with iTunes and course reserves? Why aren't there traditional library databases looking at indexing these programs? I know from a comment to my Cataloging Podcasts post, T. Scott Plutchak mentioned, "NLM is very interested in tracking all of the various new formats that we're seeing more of -- everything from video clips, to simulation software, to complex datasets, to podcasts, to whatever comes along next week. They haven't figured out HOW to properly index and archive all of that stuff, but it is very definitely on the radar." Good, it needs to be done. But that is just the medical side of things, what are librarians, libraries, and library organizations doing about the flood of information other than adding to it drop by drop?