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How Do You Solve A Problem Like Podcasts?
Greg UrquhartUrquhart Publishing Group
www.upgmedia.com
DEDU Inside Byte
Nov 13, 2015
Big Questions
• What is the role of the library when it comes to podcasts? Preservation? Access? Curation? Reference?
• Is transcription the key to searchability and preservation? What are the obstacles?
• How can we establish and maintain metadata and vocabulary standards across such an unregulated “industry”?
Podcast stats• App. 22,000 actively hosted podcasts on Libsyn• More than 300,000 podcasts and 3 million podcast episodes
available on iTunes, and growing rapidly• At a conservative average of 30 minutes per episode, that’s
more than 1.5 million hours of audio content that has ALREADY been produced.
• Last year (2014) there were more than 3 billion downloads of podcasts, and that’s only the downloads… increasingly people are streaming podcasts rather than downloading.
• In 2014, 63% of podcast downloads were requested from mobile devices, up from 43% previous year. That number is expected to rise.
Data from Pew Research Center’s journalism.org
Important Podcast Players
• Audiosear.ch & Popup Archive• Earbud.fm & other recommendation
services• Stitcher and other 3rd party audio players• iTunes, Soundcloud, Libsyn, and other
hosting and distribution platforms• Networks (NPR, Gimlet, Earwolf, etc)
Podcasting needs librarians!
• Poor metadata for most podcasts– Series level not episode level– Mostly reliant on “description” field, similar to
an abstract– Dependent on creators inputting metadata
• Lack of metadata standards– No controlled vocabularies*– Few standard fields– Lack of consistency across producers
Podcasting needs librarians!
Access to podcasts isn’t the problem, since most are readily available for free. The issue is making sense of it all and presenting it in a useful way.
Who does that better than librarians?
What can we learn from other media?
Comics: Grand Comics Database
Music: Musicbrainz.org
TV and Film: IMDb
Transcription?
https://medium.com/@PopUpArchive/is-public-media-ready-for-machine-transcription-a-socratic-dialogue-d4d09d9cdde
“To publish a transcript [for an audio story] — even a perfect one — in print, would be to assume that what works in one
medium works exactly as well in another.”
-Peter Karman (Pop Up Archive)
Transcription?
Audiosear.ch/PopUp Archive pursuing automated transcriptions synchronized to audio content.
Recent collaboration with NYPL. http://blog.popuparchive.com/?p=457
Further reading
• Is Public Media Ready For Machine Transcription? • Opening Up Audio Archives Through Human computer Collaborat
ion• Pop Up Partners With The New York Public Library And The Mo
th To Build A New Model For Accessible Audio• Pew Podcasting Fact Sheet• Why Welcome To Night Vale Is A Welcome Mutation For Podcasti
ng• How A Once Nerdy Audio Tool Is Ushering In A New Golden Age
Of Radio• How People Listen To, Save, And Discover New Podcasts
Discussion Questions
• Could we leverage community indexing, like Grand Comics Database, Musicbrainz, etc?
• Are libraries currently systematically downloading free podcasts and cataloging them in any meaningful way?
• What is the role of curation? Will librarians play that role? Publishers/editors? Listener reviews? Critical sites like earbud.fm?
• Should all podcasts be treated the same by libraries? Do narrative podcasts have different needs than science podcasts, for example?
Thank you!
Greg UrquhartUrquhart Publishing Group
202-257-2300
www.upgmedia.com