A recent posting in the Chronicle of Higher Education “Wired Campus” section describes the new iTunes U portal, “a spot on the site that will collect college lectures, commencement speeches, tours, sports highlights, and promotional material, all available at no cost.” (If you have iTunes on your desktop/laptop, you can use this link to visit iTunes U in the iTunes Store.) Now, according to the Apple press release, “content from iTunes can be loaded onto an iPod® with just one click and experienced on-the-go, anytime, making learning from a lecture just as simple as enjoying music.”

How about iTunes U as a content delivery platform for libraries. What kind of content could we put into iTunes U? Here at OhioLINK, we have the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics Recorded Sounds and Foreign Language Video Instruction that are open to the public. (Granted, we might have to do some file format conversions to meet requirements for iTunes U.) With more students and researchers using devices such as iPods and services such as iTunes U, as long as we are not entering into an exclusive agreement for delivering such content, why not meet the users where they are.

Update 19-Jan-2011: I’ve decommissioned this service. Talkr seems to be unavailable, and I haven’t had time to find a replacement.

If reading the thoughts of the Jester via this blog wasn’t enough, you can now hear this witty (witless?) insights read to you through your favorite podcast player. I’ve been messing with some technology this weekend for a mashup of my own.

First, start with the Talkr service, which will take the text of your RSS feed posts and convert them to an audio file of a computer generated voice speaking the text to you. The audio file is included as an attachment in a new RSS feed of your post content. In the sidebar of DLTJ, you can subscribe to audio version of this blog using the “Subscribe to Postcast” graphic.

But wait, there’s more! A second graphic leads to a magic iTunes URI that will add the audio version of the Jester as a podcast in your iTunes setup. That one was a little more difficult in that the RSS coming out of Talkr doesn’t have all of the necessary iTunes markup (and in some cases, the markup itself needs to be futzed with). So a quick pass through an XSLT script gives Apple the feed that they need to make this work in iTunes.

You might ask “Why iTunes?” followed closely by “Don’t they represent the new evil empire by the way they lock subscribers into using their hardware only?” and ending with “Do you really want to encourage that?” First, as an aside, I’ve already sold part of my soul to Apple — I’ve been sold on their operating system and portable computer hardware for years. But that is really okay because I own a piece of Apple’s soul — 96 pieces to be exact (unless the stock has split again since the last time I checked). Secondly, and more relevant perhaps, is a pragmatic belief to meet the users where they are. If there are potential listeners of DLTJ using iTunes and I can make it easier for them to listen to this blog on the platform of their choice without impacting those who don’t want to make iTunes their choice, then that’s fine. I had this discussion with a fellow librarian about making the OhioLINK Digital Video Collection visible through iTunesU; as long as it is not an exclusive arrangement and the no-iTunesU users are served just as well as those who access the content through iTunesU, then I don’t see a problem with “meeting the users where they are.” (Oh, and yes, I still do not own an iPod — I have a generic MP3 player that suits me just fine.)

By the way: “Can You Hear Me Now?” refers to the tagline for Verison Wireless commercials, a wireless carrier in North America. I’m not sure how well that translates outside this region.

Update [20070330T1030]: Along with the WordPress upgrade, I tweaked the RSS feeds so that the version that Talkr sees does not have the FeedBurner FeedFlares in them. The flares were coming across in the audio as “The original story included an image at this point.” Repeatedly. Quite annoying, I imagine.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://talkr.com/ on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://dltj.org/audio.rss on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.apple.com/education/products/ipod/itunes_u.html on January 19th, 2011.