This past week I played around with podcasting and YouTube. It was really fun picking out podcasts to listen to. I subscribed to a few. I can easily see health sciences students listening to podcasted lectures or tutorials. The University of Virginia’s History of Medicine podcasts are a wonderful way to introduce listeners to the historical/cultural aspects of health and medicine. I liked the very short helpful podcasts created by the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Library as they’re good for quick reference.
YouTube was interesting to explore; but I’m not so sure if I would choose this medium over others for delivering library information or instructional-type content. I found a tutorial demonstrating searching in the Cochrane database but I found the video quality not as clear as I would like, which got worse when I enlarged the video to full screen. But I did see an old National Library of Medicine video that actually looked pretty good. And that video introduced me to a source that I’d never heard of–public.resource.org. It’s an Internet archive of government-created videos (e.g. training, history, etc.). Check it out.
WONDERLUST 