The study is based on interviews with 51 academic library directors and other upper management officials in college and academic libraries, predominantly in the United States. The report looks at collection and metadata efforts in podcast content, use of such content in course reserves, as well as policies about archiving of faculty podcasts, and library production of its own podcasts. The study gives its readers a detailed picture of how academic libraries are approaching the emerging area of podcast content, detailing collection and archiving efforts, both for podcasts produced by one's own faculty or library, and for podcasts in cyberspace. Data is presented in the aggregate and also broken out by size and type of college, for public and private institutions, by tuition level and by personal characteristics of the survey respondents.
Just a few of this 41 page report’s many findings are that:
-
12.5% of doctoral institution academic libraries have a policy or formal effort to archive faculty podcasts in an institutional repository or other archive.
-
Men were are more likely than women to archive podcasts.
-
Efforts to provide metadata and finding aids for podcasts still considerably lags that of other digital resources.
-
All users of automated metadata extraction tools for podcasts were under the age of 50 and predominantly female .