Gee it's been awhile

One of our assigments is to find a library video on YouTube and embed it on the blog. Here is mine:



Okay, so it's not really serious, but I thought I'd bring some fun into ths rather dry blog.

As far as using YouTube (and I have for awhile), I find that it's very easy to find whatever's out there, between the search feature and the tags. There are a lot of libraries who have made videos (mostly humourous) to promote themselves, and of course there are all sorts of how-to/instructional videos out there, such as the ones for our class. So I think it's definitely useful. Unfortunately a lot of institutions block the service (because let's face it, there's a lot of frivolity there).

We were also supposed to check out podcasts. I went to Odeo and subscribed to the City of Casa Grande (Arizona) Public Library's monthly news. There wasn't much in the way of medical library stuff yet, although I did find one on Library 2.0, but it was a one-time thing, and we were asked to subscribe to an ongoing one.

Podcasting seems to be an excellent way to get announcements and news of the library into the hands of users, at least those that are savy. Since they can be embedded in a blog (I didn't do that here, because you have to give the service permission to access your blog and I'm not sure how I feel about that yet), people don't have to go anywhere to find the podcast. Odeo also searches for other podcasts not on its system and allows you to share the podcasts with others. Overall, I was impressed and would like to explore this further.