The use of podcasts in our library would be great for notifiying parents of school holiday program activities. We currently use mailing lists and send out many flyers advising parents of the different activities - this takes a lot of staff and volunteer time maintaining the databases, folding flyers and stuffing envelopes. How easy it would make things if we could just direct people to our website with a link to a podcast. I'm sure most of the parents and children would really enjoy receiving news and information in this format.
I think podcasts would also work really well with the general adult population for short broadcasts of news about events at the library (similar to the podcast from LibVibe). We already have a regular spot on local radio which reaches a lot of the older people in our community - I suppose it wouldn't be difficult to record this same information for a podcast.
I would be very interested to read any comments from library staff who have embraced web 2.0 technology at their libraries, and in particular how the older generation have responded to it - I could imagine that older people with some grasp of Internet technology might enjoy listening to a podcast, but posting photos to Flickr, or contributing information to a Book Lovers Wiki... I'm not so sure???? I would be very pleased to read this is not the case, but my feeling is that it might be predominantly children and teenagers in your community that have responded to your library blogs and viewed your YouTube videos etc. Any thoughts???
