Just back from vacation and popping in to highlight the most recent Carnivals:
Carnival of the Infosciences #41 at Ruminations
and
Carnival of the Infosciences #42 at ...the thoughts are broken...
Thanks to CW and Mark for their efforts. Next Carnival will be at Grumpator. Send submissions to anali[dot]perry[at]gmail[dot]com.
Christine Brown attended both of the SirsiDynix presentations that I recently gave and posted fairly comprehensive summaries of both. So if you're interested, the links follow:
Travelin' Librarian reports that the Colorado Talking Book Library has adopted RSS, providing feeds for their quarterly newsletters, including a podcast feed for the audio version. I've talked about using podcasting to extend services to your visually impaired community, but haven't had a great example to point to before now.
From the current AALL Spectrum: Podcasting, Vodcasting and Law. Nice to see that the Rutgers Law Library is doing some experimenting with podcasting. [Note: I have a few points of contention with the content of this article, but neither the time nor energy to pick it apart point-by-point. I can only recommend checking out my SirsiDynix Institute session for my take on podcasting and podcast production.]
Stephanie Librarian posts about a new podcasting project over at Alternative Teen Services. It's a project involving teens at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and, being that it's hosted at Ourmedia, should have a proper podcast feed. Alas, it doesn't work presently.
Either way, I must step back on my soapbox to point out the provided definition of podcasting in Stephanie's post: "A podcast is a digital audio file in mp3 format that can be downloaded onto a computer for listening, or saved to an mp3 player such as an I-pod." Not in and of itself untrue, but largely missing the point. I hate to be such a curmudgeon about this stuff, but folks, podcasting equals syndication. No syndication? Then it's just slapping some mp3s on a server and linking to them. Neat (and of course, the teens are understandably interested in the recording, not in geeky distribution technologies), but it's not new and not podcasting. But you've been reading this blog. You know all this already. And it seems that I'm fighting a losing battle anyway, so I'll shut up now.
The Carnival of the Infosciences #40 awaits you at Christina's LIS Rant. A nice selection this week, including an effort to put some science in the infosciences. And a heartfelt "Mazel Tov!" to Steven and family.
Next week's Carnival will be hosted at Ruminations. No post yet from our fearless host, but I imagine an email to flexnib at gmail dot com will do the trick.
While I'm here, I should note that I will be going on vacation at the end of this week, so things will be even quieter than usual for a bit.