A picture of a microphone and headphones
A screen cap of a list of podcasts I follow
Podcasts I follow (click for full list)

I have been listening to podcasts for many years - they have long helped me through my various commutes to work when reading has not been an option. They also help to relieve the tedium of housework - and even make it something to look forward to!

I have often thought about what kind of podcast I would like to make if I ever got around to being motivated enough to put aside the time or summon up the required effort. I have yet to settle on an answer. One of the problems with (but also one of the greatest strengths of) podcasts is that because anyone can produce them, the internet is completely saturated with them, on almost every conceivable subject. I listen to podcasts on science, language and literature, culture, music, history, comedy, libraries, random interesting things and more (if they'd been around when I was at university, I'm pretty sure my house mates and I would have produced some kind of scripted comedy show that I would be looking back at now, cringing with embarrassment). I have friends who produce them, others who have been interviewed about their work on them. What could I possibly hope to add? (Having said that, there is a definite lack of non-American/Canadian library-based podcasts - any UK/Irish librarians here want to start something with me?! Let's talk ideas!)

My face, singing into a microphone
Me and a microphone

Thinking about it from a work perspective, what I could add would be a podcast for a very specific audience - the students at my school. Maybe a fortnightly or monthly podcast of new titles in the library, book reviews, resource news - maybe get a few of the library assistants and avid readers to submit reviews, recommendations or opinions. Definitely something to look at when I go back in September.

Here is a short audio snippet to prove I know how these things work. Recorded on my iPhone's Voice Memo app, edited in GarageBand, uploaded to Soundcloud. Music by me:

 

For bonus points, I have also tried the self-hosting method, using a WordPress plugin called Blubrry. See below:
https://thebooklender.info/thing-7/
thebooklender.info
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-43
146185
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:7QOAATWJXTIO3BSUQS6I7RS4NTQ2QZOI
<urn:uuid:ea140da1-1f43-49e3-a3b4-a81ea7603e74>
2021-10-26T22:27:03Z
35.214.83.212
text/html
sha1:KBMUIYAYI4BWXSA3PVW3MDIFSVWJ4QMD
<urn:uuid:500a95b2-58e8-49be-b8d6-3c3bd886051b>
https://thebooklender.info/thing-7/
response
<urn:uuid:c4354563-96b5-4727-a190-471ffd44b88b>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-43
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-175
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/