Digital Audio Repositories

While looking up podcasting policies from other Universities in preparation for today's Podcast Pilot roundtable I came across this blog entry: http://dltj.org/2007/06/itunes-u/. The entry itself doesn't provide any new information but the links to digital audio provided by Ohiolink (a consortium of Ohio colleges) really caught my attention.

The Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics: http://dmc.ohiolink.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?page=index;c=blb

and

Foreign Language Videos: http://dmc.ohiolink.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?page=index;c=forglv

I have been thinking of library podcasts from an instructional viewpoint but hadn't even considered podcasts of actual archived digital content. We have oral histories here that would be perfect for podcasting.

And what about content produced by the University? There is a lot of talk (and some practice!) of libraries becoming digital repositories for all scholarly output from their University. Would the library have an obligation to archive podcasts from faculty and to make those available to the University community?

I think I will save the discussion of policies and all the fun things associated with those for the next blog entry. We're meeting in a few weeks to learn how to set up RSS feeds and then later to learn about Garageband. I am meeting with our Web master on Monday to talk about file size and other issues with creating podcasts for our page. We're also going to have shrink the Camtasia tutorials a little!