Welcome to our spring newsletter! AUDIO for the web has had a very busy few months, and the pace shows no sign of letting up. Some of our recent work is highlighted on this page, along with some exciting upcoming projects.

This newsletter is a way of keeping in touch with the friends and associates we've met since the company started in 2006. The idea is to keep it brief and very occasional, but if you'd like to unsubscribe, please use the link at the bottom of this page.

Rachel Salaman
Creative Director
AUDIO for the Web Ltd.

Featured format: case studies

Audio case studies are based on 'real people' telling their own stories in their own words. This is a powerful way of engaging people with a relevant message, as an increasing number of organisations are discovering.

Mind Tools member testimonials

The Career Excellence Club is run by Mind Tools, the internet's most visited career development website. We recorded phone interviews with five members around the world, capturing their thoughts on the benefits of the club, and mixed the highlights of these interviews with music. You can hear one of these case studies on our home page.

Royal College of Nursing audio stories

We created eight audio stories for the Royal College of Nursing, for use in their new learning resource 'Be an Effective Flexible Learner'. Running around three minutes each, the podcasts feature excerpts from face to face interviews with people who have experienced flexible learning. One of these can be heard here.

Oral history podcasting

One of our most enjoyable projects this year has been working with teenagers to create oral history podcasts at Maidstone Museum, as part of the national 'Their Past Your Future' project.

The participants interviewed local war veterans, most of them Gurkhas, and produced two types of audio programme: long archive interviews for the museum's Human History Collection and shorter personal podcasts, available for download at the museum and online.

Training

We've seen a growth in the demand for podcast training from organisations of all shapes and sizes. Here's some of the recent training I have designed and led:

Introduction to podcasting
Victoria & Albert Museum

Podcast production techniques
British Red Cross

Podcasting for Museums and Galleries
Estorick Collection, with MuseumsEtc.

Podcasting for universities: understanding iTunesU
University of Reading

Narrative techniques in podcasts
University of Newcastle

Other projects

We now produce four podcasts a month for Mind Tools. Recent highlights include original interviews with happiness expert Tal Ben-Shahar, digital guru Don Tapscott, and Steve Lucas, a global authoritiy on the art of public speaking.

We worked with the National Maritime Museum on audio content for a new exhibition about the North West Passage. We produced several clips of actors reading from explorers' personal papers, as well as interviews with two modern-day explorers. Clips of these interviews will appear in the exhibition, while longer versions can be heard in the museum's podcast series.

Our events work has included creating podcasts from a conference on the cost of scholarly communication, hosted by the Research Information Network, and an IT management seminar at Oracle's London HQ, in association with events company Alchemy.

Production work includes voice tracks for AIG, HireStrategies, BT RingCentral, eBooks4Kidz, Vion, Cosmic Global, MMRx Communications and Xhang Creative.

Upcoming

We're delighted to be working with Shape East on two extensive audio walking tours, supported by English Heritage and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). The tours will be online this summer, for visitors to the Accordia development in Cambridge and nearby Devil's Dyke.

We're helping the V&A's Centre for Excellence for Teaching and Learning Through Design (CETLD) to produce four podcasts about the museum's galleries. Aimed at design students, these podcasts will feature the voices of experts, interviewed by CETLD staff.

Training dates in the diary include more podcasting workshops in partnership with MuseumsEtc. and the E-Learning Group for Museums, Libraries and Archives. The first of these takes place on 17 June in London and there are still a few places available.

Contact

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to friends or colleagues who may be thinking about podcasting. And do get in touch with any requests, queries or feedback:

Tel: +44 (0)20 7033 3724
Email: rachel@audiofortheweb.com