I´m starting one of my life´s greatest adventures tomorrow. I´ll be a student for five years (only half time, but still) at the Oslo University College programme for postgraudate qualification in library science. This is not a Ph.D. programme as such, but will involve the same academic level and amount of work, and will focus more on practical development and unconventional modes of presentation of results than the traditional Ph.D. It is perfect for me, as I get a bit impatient with too much theory, and love to experiment and develop in my little library (which will become a sort of laboratry for the duration).
Anyway, the programme starts tomorrow, and I´m preparing as best I can. Since I want to document and remember as much as possible I´ll try to record as much as I can from both the seminars we´ll have and the work I do in my own library. I´ll take pictures, write, both on this blog, my norwegian blog and twitter. If I can I´ll make videos and post them on YouTube. The thing is though, that the thing I really want to do is to podcast. I worked in local radio in my youth, and loved it (this is 1982 when local radio was the new and rad thing in Norway) and want to do more. So I´m preparing to record sound, edit and post. This involves a lot of stuff I have long forgotten. My last period of podcasting was back in 2005 when one of the norwegain IT-news websites set up a free podcasting service (Freecast) that I used to record some podcasts where I waxed lyrical on library 2.0 and enjoyed the sound of my own voice. Then I recorded an interview with the norwegian author Eirik Newth that turned out quite well, and then an interview by Skype with Michael Stephens, as you can see I grew bolder:-) I also recorded a lecture by Marydee Ojala on developments in search (beyond Google) that she held here in Bergen. Then life kind of grabbed me by the scruff and demanded that I turned my attention elsewhere, and I kind of got distracted by our second child, and work. I have often thought that I should start podcasting again, but never got around to doing anything about it. So when the Freecast site was shut down in april this year (due to lack of intrest and possibly more competition) my podcasts dissapeared from the web. I really wanted to do something about it, but could not muster the energy and effort needed to research this to see what developments had happened on the podcasting scene since I stopped.
So the postgrad qualification prgramme was a perfect kick in the behind to start doing something about this. I started by looking at hosting my own podcast with my own blog and discovered that this was actually not too hard anymore. With WordPress there are serveral options, and I´m going for Blubrry PowerPress, which seems to integrat seamlessly into WP and do the things I want without too much fuss. I have tried to install it on my personal blog at www.miromurr.no and that worked really well, so next is my professional blog and then we´ll see if it works. I´ll re-publish my old podcasts to keep then on the web and tomorrow I´ll start recording for a completely new podcast. My first goal is to manage one podcast after each seminar, (there are four this fall) and also to do one at the Internet Librarian International conference in october. This is of course a plan, what really happens is another thing, but I hope that by posting this I have built up a certain pressure to at least give it a good shot.
Another thing that is kind of fun is to play with the themes on my blog. I´ll try a theme called Smashing Mulitimedia that is published by Smashing magazine. So far I have had some problems with the installation of the theme, so it might not be the right one for me, but I´ll give it a few more shots before I give up. Other than that I´m reading course literature, updating myself on Zotero and RefWorks (still don´t know which one I´ll end up using) and thinking about the stuff I want to do in the programme. Loads of fun should ensue:-)
Filed under: Library 2.0, Podcast , 1bib, student
I love the idea of open source and the community around Koha. That I have something in common with librarians in New Zealand, USA and France is just awsome.
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