Princeton is making audio recordings of public lecturesavailable in podcast form on its WebMedia site. The archive contains over 800 files dating back to 1998 and includes lectures by many prominent guests.

Streaming videos of campus events have been publicly available through the Princeton WebMedia website for years, but the University wants to “leverage the technology” of podcasts to make the lectures more easily accessible, Office of Information Technology (OIT) director of academic services Serge Goldstein said.

The lecture videos “don’t have as broad an audience as they could or should have,” he said. The video files can’t be saved, but the podcasts can be downloaded onto computers and then loaded onto iPod or other portable devices.

The videos and podcasts are meant to benefit the public more than students and faculty, Goldstein said. “I think the bulk of the people interested in this material will be people outside of the University,” he said. “It’s not primarily targeted at students per se.”

via Daily Princetonian,