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You don’t have to be a media mogul to create audio and video for iPods

By Jason Griffey -- Library Journal, 6/15/2007

At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), we offer student workshops that range from Cool New Web Stuff (what’s out on the web that can help make research or just plain life easier) and How To Use Google Scholar. These workshops are brilliant fodder for podcasting. In fact, the initial idea for our podcast project came from a student plagiarism workshop that used music and mashups to illustrate “good” and “bad” borrowing.

Getting started is easier than you might think. There are three key parts to implementing podcasting successfully at your library: creating the podcast content, distributing the podcasts, and, if possible, aggregating and syncing to iPods locally (if you choose to manage and circulate iPods to your patrons). If you choose not to circulate the hardware, creation and distribution are the only necessary steps to begin exploring.

Podcasting automatically delivers content in audio or video format to patrons via an RSS feed, an XML file designed for syndication. The flexibility of RSS allows you to repackage multimedia content in nearly unlimited ways. If you think of individual audio or video pieces as learning objects, RSS is the piece that gives those learning objects a direction and a destination. Distance education is a staple at many universities, and podcasts offer hard-to-beat advantages for those users. They are asynchronous, allowing patrons to choose when they want library instruction. They teach to multiple learning styles. They allow for infinite review and reinforcement of skills. And they can be broken into smaller, more digestible chunks than the typical 50-minute instruction session in academic and public libraries. Simply, many patrons can be better served with podcasts.

At UTC, we have a robust instructional connection with our English department and our Introduction to University Life sessions. These two areas give rise to our three primary library instruction programs: USTU101, ENGL121, and ENGL122. These three are the most systemized of our classes and are designed to take UTC freshmen through the basics of library research.

USTU101, Introduction to University Life, is our most basic class. It covers layout of the physical library, what library materials are useful to students, and how to find the physical objects within our walls. ENGL121 is designed to introduce students to the basics of research, delving into the simplest sorts of full-text databases. And ENGL122 is our most complex class, where we discuss the fundamentals of information evaluation as well as finding non-full-text database articles, interlibrary loan, and other eccentricities of university-level research. With each of these classes, we use podcasting to increase student learning and ease the instructional burden on librarians.

The first step is to identify existing content that might translate well into an audio or video format. Many librarians who are experimenting with podcasts have started with the “virtual tour,” since video is a natural for showing patrons around. Many museums also offer podcasts, and their efforts can be good models for libraries.

Other learning objects that seem obvious for conversion are tutorials that have already been screencasts, like something on how to use specific databases or the basics of search strategies and Boolean logic. Converting this sort of information to podcasts is simply a matter of adapting from one video format to another.

At UTC, our primary goal was to allow for the time-shifting of library instruction, to enable students to learn at their own convenience. After looking at our instruction load, we saw that our basic introduction to the physical library class would be the best choice for initial conversion. As the classes are currently taught, students are led through a sort of game before they come in for their main class with an instruction librarian. The game and the session that follows are perfect for the move to audio/video because they are suited for one-to-many instruction rather than being discussion oriented as are most of our other classes.

Another benefit: the potential for replay. For example, nonnative-English speakers can rewind bits that need clarification. But everyone can benefit from instruction delivered this way, even if they only use it to review material that is ordinarily delivered face-to-face or in online tutorials. Podcasts can also be effective as a precursor to in-person instructional sessions, because they can deliver preliminary information so users are ready for more in-depth content delivered in a traditional manner.

Some combination of widely used software, training, and collaboration eases the transformation from librarian to media mogul. For academic librarians, it is almost certain that somewhere on your campus you have faculty who produce media, whether they are affiliated with a radio/TV department, help run the university radio station, or just teach media studies. Reach out to these specialists and you’ll be surprised how eager they are to help.

Combine this available talent with the ease of use built into Apple’s media software like GarageBand and iMovie, and you can be producing high-quality audio and video in a very short time. [See “Hardware Made Easy,” p. 34.] Don’t expect to be an expert overnight, but after a few weeks of trial and error, you’ll be making smoothly transitioned video that looks better than your local public access channels.

Training issues nearly all relate to librarians’ unfamiliarity with RSS and how to create quality media files. Your videos don’t have to look like you’re screening them at the Sundance Film Festival, but patrons are extremely media savvy, and will pass judgment on poorly produced media in the same way that librarians pass judgment on poorly designed web sites. If the information doesn’t look or sound good, it is likely to be perceived as not being good. In the audio realm, you don’t need to produce 5.1 THX surround sound, but you do have to pay attention to the basics of enunciation and volume.

The good news is that the RSS education problem is solving itself, if slowly. More and more libraries are working with blogs, wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, and other Web 2.0 sites that offer RSS, and many librarians are using aggregators like Bloglines to pull in RSS for consumption. The link between RSS and podcasting is that a podcast is an RSS feed with an enclosure. In very basic terms, an RSS enclosure is just some type of multimedia content: an MP3, AVI, MPEG, or other media file. Technically, an enclosure can be any sort of binary content (RSS could be used to “feed” program updates, called appcasting), but for the purposes of a podcast we’re limiting those enclosure types to media files, almost always in the form of an MP3 for audio or an MPEG for video. Thus, RSS has established itself through wide usage and implementation. It is the essential delivery mechanism for podcasts.

Since anything that plays well with RSS can potentially be distributed via a podcast, you can leverage these feeds in lots of fun ways. Want to highlight some of your podcasts on your web site? Include the RSS feed in the HTML, and anyone visiting your page will see and can grab the audio or video they are interested in if you enable downloads. Does your school use Blackboard as a class management system? It is simple to include a feed inside existing classes that need the particular bit of library instruction you are pushing out via podcast using feed2js and other free software.

When I mention this project, many patrons and librarians ask, “But what if I don’t have an iPod?” While it seems that on some campuses iPods are required for entry, not every student owns that omnipresent Apple product.

The truth is that any portable MP3 player can handle an audio podcast, and, failing that, any computer can decode and play the file. So every computer on campus and off becomes a player if a user simply visits your web site or logs into course management software like Blackboard.

Video is slightly more complicated, because a clear, universal standard has not yet emerged in the same way as MP3 has for audio. You can provide different feeds for different video types and by sticking with the more prevalent standards be sure that you are providing a file that can be accessed by the widest number of patrons. Owing to the ubiquity of video iPods, a specific flavor of MPEG4 (H.264) is emerging as a standard for video delivery. It is viewable on most every portable video device being sold these days (including the Playstation Portable).

Librarians will continue to have to develop new skills that may not have been predicted by our MLS degrees. When I went to library school in 2002–04 at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, I don’t remember a Multimedia for Librarians class being available. Our roles as librarians keep shifting to meet the needs and desires of our patrons. We have picked up web skills, programming, and instructional design. Now, let’s dive into a little video editing, cue up the audio, find the clipboard, and learn why Apple has sold so many of those little white multimedia objets d’art.