The New York Public Library doesn’t need any introduction. But it’s new page on iTunes perhaps does. It went live yesterday (access it here), and it gives you access (all of it free, of course) to many great cultural productions staged by NYC’s foremost library. You’ll find an extensive collection of “conversations” with some of today’s leading authors — John Updike (transcript), Umberto Eco (video), Paul Auster (video), to name a few. (You can get the full author list here.) You’ll also get to rummage around in the library’s large Jazz Oral History Project, which features interviews with an impressive number of important jazz figures. And then lastly — and for better or for worse — you can listen to what is currently the library’s most heavily downloaded podcast — Christopher Hitchen’s now well known debate with Al Sharpton.
As a last aside, it’s worth mentioning that you don’t need an iPod to access many of NYPL’s offerings. You can find many of the same materials on the library’s web site. (See here.) And, for more cultural podcasts, please be sure to check out our Ideas & Culture Podcast Collection. You’ll find a lot of good content along the same lines as what the NYPL has to offer.
It’s my new favorite part of iTunes but I had missed that jazz oral history section. Amazing.