Free Speech Digitally Remastered

In my graduate course this week, we are learning about Personal On Demand broadcasting, or podcasting as it is known. So I listened to some podcasts I found on YouTube at www.youtube.com that pertain to my topic of digitizing information for libraries. I found a very interesting one titled "Digital Library of Congress" made by VOAvideo.

This podcast concerned the digitization project being performed by the U.S. Library of Congress which, according to the podcast, currently has about 134,000,000 items stored at its facility. Among the informational resources available at the Library of Congress, the podcast mentions books, maps, photographs, music, and film that they are working to digitize. One impediment to this project is some information items cannot be digitized at this time because of copyright law issues. Check it out:



For anyone wishing to subscribe to this podcast, the link to the YouTube page where the Subscribe button is located is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ajvcS7LDI0.

Hearing and viewing these podcasts about current projects in information digitization helped me to gain a clearer understanding of exactly what such projects entail and what challenges they face. The good thing about podcasts in general is you can listen to or watch them whenever it is convenient for you.

While podcasting has gained a great deal of popularity in recent years, I do not know if it is a medium I will use much. I find listening to podcasts difficult because I do not learn well from an oral exchange of information. Some of the podcasts I found were 20-30 minutes long, and I simply could not listen to them drone on after a few very long minutes. With no way to scan ahead, I kept wondering if they would ever say something I would find interesting. I would give up quickly and move on to another file in hopes of a better presentation of information.

Here's a good rule of thumb for people podcasting out there: when producing a long podcast, you need to keep entertainment values in mind if you want it to be heard all the way through to the end.

Fortunately, the one I found about the Library of Congress was only 3:39 minutes long. Its brevity ensured my attention to the end, and it was informative as well. Listening to this particular expression of free speech was my time well spent.

One Topic To Rule All Topics

(from Google Images)

While I will be learning many important facets of librarianship in my LS5013 class - which naturally I will share with my readers here - the topic of interest I have chosen to focus on is Library Digitization Programs, or how libraries organize their information digitally. I am particularly interested in academic libraries.

One aspect of libraries that I love is the wealth of research materials they provide, yet all of that information must be stored in a manner that is easily accessible and retrievable for users who visit the library. Gone are the days when a good card catalog was all a library needed. In this Internet age when people can access news, articles, research papers, journals, and even some books electronically online, how do traditional libraries compare with the convenience of the Internet and/or compete? How do libraries successfully organize their information to make searches for material as easy to perform as a Google search, while (hopefully) being more accurate in meeting the user's needs? I find this topic fascinating, and I intend to find answers to these questions as my college semester progresses.

To get started, I looked for others who share a similar interest using blogsearch.google.com, and I found this entertaining blog titled "Digital Library Organiziation: A Research Proposal": http://digital.lib.ecu.edu/collaboratory/?p=281. In this blog, the author proposes:


Digital initiatives are fast moving. There is no single definition of what a “digital” unit does. Therefore, what types of projects are “digital” library units doing? How are these departments organized and how do they operate within the library?

By examining this, I hope to develop a model for classifying different types of digital library work and define some of the characteristics of each. This will show what the necessary elements are to perform different types of digital work and what the potential weaknesses might be for strategic planning.

The blog also provides some useful links to a variety of digitization programs I can explore further online. Here's the first step in my journey. This is not the end.