Two years ago when I started doing Circulating Ideas, I had only my five year old iMac, GarageBand, and Skype, with my site set up on Google’s free Blogger platform. The earliest monetary investment I made was securing the domain name registration. You can hear the poor audio quality in those first few episodes until I upgraded to a Blue Snowball mic and added Audacity to my mix of sound tools. I continue to work on the same iMac (with a hard drive upgrade) and still use GarageBand as my primary editing tool. When I attended the Public Library Association conference in the Spring of 2012, I was able to use some equipment loaned from my place of work, like a portable digital recorder and a laptop, because I had been sent by them to cover the conference; this was nice because otherwise I had no options for recording on the go (I didn’t even have a smartphone at that point).
Now I can continue along like this for the foreseeable future and keep interviewing more great, innovative librarians but in order for the show to grow and flourish, I need to upgrade not only my mobile options but also my home office equipment. I do the show on my own time, outside of work, so all current costs and any prospective upgrades come out of my own pocket.
However, that’s where you can come in to help.
I’ve started a Kickstarter campaign to support the show and I would appreciate any help you can provide. If you don’t have money to give, just passing along this information about the campaign would be a great help. I’ve started off with some modest goals for improvements and have plans for stretch goals beyond the initial funding request to provide bigger and better services with more advanced equipment and software with additional fun rewards to go along with it.
Thanks for helping to circulate the ideas.
