How do you find useful podcasts on History SPOT? There are three options.
- Browse through the index by seminar group/conference title
- Use the Search Engine (top right hand corner)
- Use the metadata tags
If you are interested in a particular seminar group or conference then using the index is the most straightforward method. Simply click on the podcast tab and your there! However, if you are looking for content on your specific research topic (for instance let’s say health) then you will want to look between events. One method for doing this is to type ‘health’ into the search engine. This will bring up results including event groupings, individual podcast pages, and any additional files such as pdf’s that include that search term. This can be a useful method to see what is there in all its forms.
However, an alternative route would be to use the podcast tags. You can access these from the left hand column. There are two choices: Podcast Tags (created by the History SPOT administrator) and User Tags (created by you, the users).
The Podcast Tags have been selected from content in the podcasts but (admittedly) are not comprehensive or fully standardised. This is something we hope to improve upon in the future.
By clicking on any one of these tags you will bring up a list of all podcasts tagged with that word. So for health (as of writing) there will appear 10 podcasts ranging from those made from last year’s Anglo-American conference on Health in History to seminar podcasts by the Global History seminar, Sports and Leisure History seminar, and Voluntary Action History seminar.
If you feel that a podcast requires additional tags you can create your own (user tags). When you are logged in to History SPOT go to the relevant podcast and click on the ‘Tags’ button near the top of the page.
On this page you may add which ever tag(s) you feel would be useful. These will then appear on the ‘user tags’ heading on the podcast page and in the bottom left hand block.*
*It should be noted that user tags will be monitored to reduce inaccurate tagging where possible.