Podcasts

I've opened the Podcast Box and now I can't stop. So many interesting, inspiring, entertaining, hilarious things to listen to as I slog down the the treadmill every other morning. I'm with Mally when she says they could be renamed Fitcasts. Once again I'm amazed by the uses technology can be made to serve. I've discovered that people give out awards for the best podcasts each year in a variety of categories and I intend to work my way through all of them. Of course not while at work, as the computer I am working on is preventing me from accessing any podcast at the moment. I will be checking out the Parsec Awards which reward excellence in various aspects of Speculative Fiction Podcasting. "Parsec Awards are made to SF and Fantasy original content, podiobooks and a variety of other categories dealing with the new frontiers of portable media" Podiobooks, that's a new one for me, but I like the sound of them! Apparently they are serialized audio books made available in a podcast format. A link to this site from our library website may be of interest to our clients who love SF and Fantasy fiction. Unfortunately you don't seem to be able to access the podiobooks from the Parsec site but you can then google the award winning titles you are interested in and go from there. On further exploration I have discovered Romance Podiobooks, ...cough...although these do seem to be serving a niche market!

In a library environment we can make our own podcasts of the events we run, for example the Estelle Blackburn talk we had a while ago would have made a terrific podcast. Alternatively we can provide access to podcasts that reflect our current marketing strategy or simply make available podcasts that we think may be of interest to our customer. As always, how we make use of this tech is bound by staffing/time constraints, alas.