Beyond the Shelves: Exploring The Voices of All Through Podcasting

Academic podcasting provides an innovative platform to capture and communicate the voices of all, disrupting traditional academic publishing models through open and accessible media. But can they serve as a platform to include living indigenous knowledge, decolonise research and liberate the library by capturing and distributing oral narratives within a context relevant to your library community? This workshop will enable IATUL delegates to explore this question and develop the skills to plan an effective podcast. We will explore possibilities and share our experiences of developing the IATUL Beyond the Shelves podcast based on a collaborative IATUL funded International Research and Study Programme project. This will cover the pre-production, production and post-production stages of podcasting. Delegates will then have the opportunity to consider and plan a podcast series focussed on the voices of all, incorporating proposed episodes with indigenous or previously excluded library communities. As Chong (2022) articulates, libraries are still to effectively capture the knowledge systems of First Nations people. Could capturing the oral traditions of indigenous communities be a potential response? Ewing (2022) poses a similar question when articulating the dominant epistemology of universality favoured by Western modernity, calling instead for pluralistic approaches including multiple and diverse voices. How can oral traditions and living knowledge be adopted to capture and distribute the voices of all in our university libraries? What opportunities does the audio medium of podcasting provide?