Library Audio Tours
Mar 8th, 2006 by Karen
Yesterday I listened to my first library audio tour being put out by the WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) library. What is cool about this tour is that it has activities that educate users how to use the library as part of the tour. It is also neat because it isn’t just a single person talking. The tour has you “meet” different people as you travel throughout the library. The people tell you about different things or comment on a place or service. Also this library is offering a podcast about new library resources and services.
I really like the idea of doing this sort of thing. Because we have several branches that are part of the UH Libraries, I think that it would be really cool to do this type of thing for each of the branches. Particularly when the branch libraries have less basic level information literacy going on. An audio tour would help first-year students familarize themselves with both the branch library and some information literacy basics. I need to talk to the Coordinator of Library Instruction and see what she thinks about this idea. It wouldn’t take much in the way of equipment to get the job done. In fact we already have a nice lapel microphone to use for usability testing. Audio editing/creation software like Audacity is free. So the biggest thing would be planning and developing a script.
Glad you found the tour fun! We did use Audacity, and although it didn’t take long to pull together a script, it took forever to get all the people to do (and re-do) their “part” which we spliced together very easily using Audacity. Many library staff & student employees offered their voices - but we did have to use a quiet room to record (even though it may seen on the fly). I used a higher quality headset with microphone from Plantronics (around $85 I think) because the inexpensive microphones I tried were horrible.
We have a few older OTIS MP3 players that we have put the tour on that can be checked out at the Circulation Desk. I have put some of the podcasts on the iPods we check out with our eAudio books).