I found a lot of great podcasts out there. I found the most on YouTube. I was looking for 2 types of podcats. One, anything on "information commons" my pet project and also anything we could use for bibliographic instruction which is a library project. I swear I though YouTube was mainly for looking up crazy singing cat videos.
Some of the bibliographic instruction ones are specific to certain schools but quite a few of them are generic enough to be used by anyone. Here I go being cheap again. We are planning to use Camtasia to create inhouse videos to teach all sorts of things. I got stuck with creating the script for teaching the Ebscohost databases since that it is one of the things the Reference Dept. teaches in my library. Just before spending hours looking at the steps involved I remembered the help files from Ebscohost. Guess what! Ebscohost used Camtasia to create their own version of tutorials to teach both basic and advanced searching in the Ebscohost databases. I sent the urls to the committee working on our podcats/tutorials and went to get a Cafe Mocha from Starbucks instead.
That's just one example. Looking at some others, we found some topics that we will have to do ourselves but that we had not even thought of doing . This is going to save us lots of time reinventing the wheel. To be honest these are from much bigger schools who often have time to do a series of podcasts. I love the Arizona State University "Library Minutes" series. It is amazing how much information you can pack into a single minute. That one went straight into my Google Reader.
Now back to the singing cats.
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