Status Line
- General Information
- October 2006
- Issue: 206
Interfacing With Students
Classes are back in session, which has brought out students and their MP3 players. Inevitably one of these students will ask you to recommend some good music sites, so you may want to checkout Extreme Tech’s Review of Free Music Recommendation Services http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697, 1967383,00.asp , and Dave Mattison’s guide to classical music databases and web resources from the July issue of Searcher: http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/jul06/Mattison.shtml. You can find podcasts of interest to your users and you as well here: Podcast Alley, Indiepodder.org, Podcast.net, Yahoo! Podcasts. And find (legal) music here: Music Download Services Compared!, eMusic, Bleep, Rhapsody.
For an introduction to the legal issues surrounding podcasting, you may want to checkout Creative Commons Podcasting Legal Guide http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Podcasting_ Legal_Guide . Want an intro to podcasting and why you might be interested in it? Then check out the piece Amy Gahran wrote on her blog Contentious.com http://contentious.com/ archives/2004/10/29/what-is-podcasting-and-why-shouldyou- care .
Another way to reach out to the student population might be to create a social network on sites like MySpace.com, Facebook.com, Multiply.com or one of the other social networking sites that keep popping up, and ask students to join your network. If you don't want to share your news with the world at large, just those you know, Multiply.com may be the network for you. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, has a list of notable social networking web sites http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites .
Several libraries are doing outreach to their students or communities with MySpace.com. Nylink member examples are Brooklyn College, CUNY http://www.myspace.com/brooklyncollegelibrary and SUNY Morrisville http://www. myspace.com/morrisvillecollegelibrary . Tied into this idea is using the blog feature on MySpace.com to keep students up-to-date about library happenings. SUNY Morrisville and Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, http://www.myspace.com/ brackenlibrary are doing it now and do a great job pushing out information of interest to their students via this technology. To help give you some legal guidelines in the realm of blogging, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/ .