Happy Pod-i-versary!

Yesterday marked the two year anniversary of our first library podcast here at GPC. This was really something I did on a lark to see what would happen and to do a little playing with technology. I never really expected it to take off on campus or open up any of the opportunities I've had over the past year or so.

As far as our library podcasting goes, we've been through a few different versions over the last two years. We started with around 10 minute news podcastings, expanded to a longer radio show type program complete with music (not the best idea in retrospect!), cut the music and length and are now experimenting with even shorter single topic podcasts. I would love to do something like the Scientific American 60 Second Science podcasts, which focus on a single science topic for a minute each day. But doing a topic every couple of weeks (or maybe less) seems a little more feasible.

In addition to library news and info, we've podcast audio from campus presentations, interviews with authors, and readings. And gotten involved with our college literary quarterly. Our school also now has a fairly organized podcasting program with a group of instructors in a pilot program this semester creating content for their course. The program is run by our IT and Teaching and Learning folks, but the work that we've done in the library really helped to raise awareness of the technology and get us to this point. This perception as being a leader in technology on campus is a great potential benefit of experimenting with web 2.0 tools in your library.

I've used these in a couple of presentations before, but here are 8 quick things I've learned from podcasting over the past couple of years:

1. Make sure it feeds!
2. Promote. Then promote some more.
3. Keep it short.
4. Use music sparingly!
5. Multiple voices rock.
6. Podcast events.
7. Consider your web presence.
8. Listen to your listeners.

So all in all it's been a fun experience. And it's great to see all of the other libraries out there who are doing such cool and innovative things with the technology now too!