The most popular podcast on law librarianship any where! Guaranteed. Law Librarian Conversations, or LawLibCon, is a monthly podcast hosted by Richard Leiter and co-hosted by Marcia Dority Baker (who functions as the chat room monitor and time keeper) and Roger Skalbeck, Associate Director for Electronic Resources and Services at Georgetown Law Library.
For the first year or two, Brian Striman was the in-house co-host, until other professional responsibilities got in the way. The podcast has aired 29 episodes since it began in May 2008 and has received over 30,000 archived listens (most of which were downloaded from iTunes) and over 4000 live listens. Law librarianship’s professional organization, the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), has just over 3000 members, so the statistics appear to show that a large percentage of the members are listening in.
Feedback has been very favorable and over the years we’ve had some very interesting and surprising guests: Anarag Acharya, Founder of Google Scholar was a guest shortly after the released their case law service. We’ve also welcomed Roberta Shaffer, the Law Librarian of Congress, the president and Lou Andreozzi, CEO of Bloomberg Law, numerous AALL presidents, authors and law faculty. Prof Marvin Ammori was guest to discuss “Net Neutrality,” and Prof Richard Dooling talked about his book Rapture for the Geeks. Carl Malmud, John Palfrey and Robert Berring have also been guests on the show. In general the show has been a huge success and the demand for more is constant.
The story about how the podcast got started is a simple one. Several years ago I was listening to a podcast about technology. One of the guests was Dave Winer, the man credited with creating RSS, among other things. He was on the podcast as a panelist and at some point he mentioned a new product that he had developed called, Cinch, which was a tool that allowed users to create accounts for free and then use their phones to record anything and preserve the recordings as well as share them with friends. It sounded kind of like a Facebook or Twitter, but with sound recordings instead of text, and you could use your phone to record the conversations. Easy.
At some point, Cinch developed a bigger platform called BlogTalkRadio, which was a free service that allows anyone with a phone and a computer to create their own radio talk show. Something about it hooked me and I decided to give it a try. I asked my friend and colleague, Brian Striman, Head of Technical Services to serve as co-host of the first show. I also called my friend, Ken Svengalis, then librarian at the Rhode Island Law Library and author of the very important book, Legal Information Buyer’s Guide, a standard work that has been published for over twenty years and is now considered a standard work for all law librarians.
Much to my surprise, Ken accepted my invitation and Brian agreed to co-host my crazy idea. I used Twitter and email listservs for publicity for the first show. (Yes, I had a Twitter account in February 2008!) The show got out to an inauspicious start when the music cued up incorrectly and we couldn’t figure out how to end the show! That first episode was such a disaster, I scrapped it and we did it over again the next week.
I scheduled a 90 minute program and much to my surprise, we had 152 live listeners to the first show. BlogTalkRadio also processes the shows and puts them up on iTunes as podcasts. That first show has since been listened to 1213 times. We average about 150 live listeners and nearly 1000 downloads per episode. The rest is history.
-Rich Leiter
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/lawlibcon