File under "Now I've Seen It All"

The Oconaluftee Trunpike Company is a Japanese oldtime string band. This footage was taken live at The Honky Tonk in Kyoto.



They sound great.

Scenic Roots @ MBL

Today I created a youtube channel for Marianna Black Library. This is the first video added to the channel - Erin and Amber Rogers, of Scenic Roots, who played here at MBL last night. They were great and the crowd (and I mean crowd) loved them! Here's a little montage I put together for the MBL youtube channel.



More music videos to come. Also, possibly story times, SRP footage, library tours, etc.

Thing #21 - podcasts

Like youtube, I've been familiar with podcasting for some time now. NPR was probably my first experience with podcasting, as "On the Media" as been offering mp3 downloads of it's show for years (Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, by the way, has just started offering mp3 downloads - YES!). I've owned an mp3 player for only a short time, but I love down loading podcasts. The New Yorker, which I subscribe to, has been offering a great series of contemporary fiction writers reading their favorite short stories out load and then discussing them at Fiction Podcasts. One of my favorites is Jhumpa Lahiri reading and discussing William Trevor’s short story “A Day.”

I also go to the New York Times Podcasts often. There you hear NYT topstories, book reviews, music reviews, science news, business news, the Ethesist and more.

I went to Podcast Alley to see what I could see (or, I guess, hear what I could hear). I first searched the term "library" and 147 podcasts came up. I semi-randomly chose #66, Library of the Living Dead. This is "A Podcast dedicated to discussion and reviews of all things Zombie. Zombie novels, Zombie short stories, Zombie graphic novels, Zombie comics, Zombie science and last, but not least, Zombie movies." Each podcast is about 2 hours, you read that right, 2 hours long. I only lasted about 9 minutes, but hey, I'm just reporting my findings here. Here is a photo on the the webpage:

Another library related podcast is that of Sarah Anne Long, who does "Long Shots." Sarah is the director of the North Suburban Library System in Wheeling, IL and in her podcasts she "explores the world of libraries through interviews with key library figures and commentary on issues that matter to libraries." To this day there are 103 podcasts, here's the latest one.

I've also seen story time podcasts in the past and I think that would be a wonderful thing for FRL to persue in the future.

Technical Services/ER spoof

This was on Tame the Web today. I thought I'd share.

Here is the video description from youtube:

• This is an "ER" spoof video for the Arlington Heights Memorial Library Technical Services Department, entitled "TS". The LibVlog series video was written by and stars AHML staff members.

Thing #20 - youtube

I've had a youtube account for over a year and I find youtube fascinating. I cannot believe how much knowledge there is out there that folks want to share - for free. There's a guy (Patrick Costello) who just gives banjo lessons away at http://youtube.com/user/Dobro33H here is lesson #1 for those who are interested in clawhammer frailing banjo.





After exploring youtube for more banjo and guitar stuff I told my wife that there were probably folks out there show others how to bake (her latest obsession). Sure enough, there were dozens of people making sour dough starters with the video camera rolling.

It would be nice to start a MBL youtube page in the future. I can imagine an updated storytime or promoting events (Community Music Jam) on youtube.

Thing #19 - Exploring

I looked at the http://www.seomoz.org/ awards and decided to check a few things I'd never heard of.

While I do know about self publishing, I had not heard of Lulu, which helps writers, musicians, movie makers, just about all artists, get into the marketplace. Lulu help you publish you book and also helps you sell it. I took their tour and actually found it quite interesting. I then looked at some of their non-fiction books (I'm sorry, but fiction self-published books tend to be awful - call me a snob, I don't care). I found quite a few books on gardening, cooking, hiking (I found this book, which I think we might purchase for the library Freezer Bag Cooking: Trail Food Made Simple ) and I also looked at their self-published poetry (scary - again, call me a snob).

I next looked at http://www.metacafe.com/ which is sort of like youtube, but not as good. Which make me wonder why anyone would go to metacafe other than those who just want to boycott youtube because it's too popular. Anyway, seomoz gave it an award as third best in the video catagory.

More on #18

So that was one mighty long post. Obviously a link to the training might have been better, but I'm going to leave it the way it is, just to show "what not to do."

Anyway, I can see how powerful this application could be. And the thought that all of this can be accessed from any computer connected to the internet - very nice.

I see a fine line of difference between this and wikis, as far as in-house collaboration is concerned. In fact, I can't see any difference for in-house collaboration.