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.