It has been one year since we posted the first episode of METRO’s Library Bytegeist podcast. Fittingly, Molly Schwartz, our Studio Manager who also hosts and produces Library Bytegeist (LB), created a “year in review” for the podcast’s 14th episode.
Join Molly as she looks back at the year gone by with audio snippets from past episodes, a short history of how the podcast came into being, and a reflection on all of the changes that METRO has been through in the past year. This episode includes a couple of announcements about what’s in store for the future of LB… so listen away and stay tuned!
To tide you over until Library Bytegeist’s re-emergence, here are some of Molly’s thoughts on what inspired her to produce a more introspective episode for the season finale:
Sometimes, even when the demands of daily life are forcing us to focus on the present and the future, it is impossible to resist the Orphean pull to look backwards. We who work in cultural heritage are very familiar with this urge. The allure and mystery of the past, both our own and others, was the appeal that drew me to archival work in the first place. I’m sure many other archivists, librarians, and curators can relate.
I love origin stories. One of my favorite questions for fellow librarians is about their library origin story – how did they come to work in libraries? (There’s a great episode of Lost in the Stacks that explores the shift from romance to reality in library work.) So, it was a total pleasure to get a little experimental in this episode and play with the ways that I can tell Library Bytegeist’s origin story, which is tied inextricably to my own personal story and the story of METRO as an organization.
Chains of custody, provenance, respect des fonds: archival principles require that we systematically acknowledge the chain of events that brought us to this moment. The first year of Library Bytegeist has been experimental. You have listened along with me as I learned how to produce audio, and for that I’m grateful.
With this episode we are wrapping the first season of Library Bytegeist and taking a production break. We will be structuring and rebooting the podcast with new episodes coming out in 2018. Please feel free to send us any pitch ideas for new episodes by tweeting @LibBytegeist or emailing me at mschwartz@metro.org.
Thanks to all you library listeners – until next time!