Podcasting to an international audience

The Centre of South Asian Studies has published several audio and audio-visual podcasts on YouTube and, with the assistance of the University's Office of External Affairs and Communications, has also published them on the University's Video & Audio web-pages as a means of promoting our oral history and film collections. They have enabled us to reach a far larger audience than might have been possible had we only made them accessible via our own web-pages. One such example is a short documentary covering some of the linguistic highlights in the Centre's oral history collection, introduced by Mr Ivan Coleby, who digitised this collection.
For further examples, please see: http://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/654115

On YouTube, do see A glimpse of India, in which Dr Annamaria Motrescu and Dr Kevin Greenbank discuss the Centre's film collection and you can view highlights from our 300 amateur cinefilms.

We have been delighted by the positive feedback - do read the Comments section after you have viewed the  podcast.
Our next project is to produce a longer audio-visual piece, again with the help of the University's Office of External Affairs and Communications, which we can use at conferences and open days.  Sadly this will not be ready until October, so I will not be able to use it at this September's Open Library day. 

Podcasting has enabled us to entertain and inform audiences across the world.  It works especially well for oral and film collections, but I am considering how we might use it to promote more traditional library collections.

Slideshare

Georges Nijs (Flickr, Creative Commons)

This image of a large tabular iceberg was taken by Georges Nijs, and posted on Flickr with a creative commons licence.

I has hoped to embed the presentation by Dr Julian Paren in this post, but the only way I was able to publish it was directly from Slideshare to Blogger, as a separate post.   I would welcome concise advice as to how I could have achieved this as I have spent far too long pasting the embedded HTML code into my blog and failing, reading Slideshare Help screens etc. I was also prompted to create my own Slideshare account - which I did (yes, yet another password, licence agreement...).  Was this necessary to embed someone else's presentation into my blog?

Hopefully, by the time you read this you will have enjoyed viewing The World's last great wilderness (Antarctica) by Dr Julian Paren, Schools Liaison Officer, British Antarctic Survey.  Dr Paren gave this talk at the Royal Geographical Society, on 8th February 2001.

I hope to master the art of embedding presentations in my blog, and perhaps in future I will embed presentations from SAALG conferences into the SAALG blog.  Currently these are posted on the SAALG website. 

The University's Press Office embedded a YouTube presentation in their press release announcing the launch of the Centre of South Asian Studies' digitised film archive. The Centre's archivist, Dr Kevin Greenbank is interviewed with Film archivist Annamaria Motrescu. We have received very good feedback from the presentation.

I hope to be able to embed presentations into the Centre's Library web pages too, particularly some I have viewed relating to research skills, which may assist our MPhil students, plus the YouTube presentation on our cinefilms.