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”?

Podcasts demand our attention

% of US population >12yo who have listened to podcasts

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)

1.5 million hours

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

greg@upgmedia.com

www.upgmedia.com