Guidelines for Using iTunes U Fields

Introduction

While uploading content is not difficult, it is necessary to enter several "fields" of information about each file. This is called "metadata," or data about your data. The metadata in iTunes was designed with music in mind, making it necessary to align the pertinent information about your content with the field names for music content. This short guide will help you use these fields in a way that helps students find and organize their iTunes U content, as well as help the University as a whole use these fields in a consistent and meaningful way.

Fields

Following are the most commonly used fields in iTunes, along with our recommendation for using these fields. Any expression in all capital letters indicates a case where you would replace the expression with the appropriate content: For example, YOURNAME would indicate your name. Generic examples of use are normal text, in quotation marks. The cases where we recommend the exact text for the field are in bold text.

Album

Note that the iTunes interface where students download files will pull the album name from the name of Podcast series. The field appears as podcast in the podcasting folder of iTunes, but reverts to album if the file is moved to the Music folder, and in the file information box you can open by selecting the file and going to File: Get Info. You do not add the album name manually, but associate it with a podcast series by adding the file to the appropriate podcast series. In other words, you will determine the Album name once when you launch a new podcast series.

We recommend you use the Album/Podcast field to indicate your course in this format: DEPT COURSE# COURSENAME SECTION# SEM (e.g., "Engl 1001 Introduction to English Literature Sec. 1 Fall 08").

Grouping

Note that each Group will result in a new tab in the iTunes podcasting window, and that a number of unique group names will make the interface cluttered and impractical. We thus recommend selecting a few discrete group names whether or not you choose to use the recommended grouping strategy below.

We recommend that you use the Group field to separate different versions or quality of the same content. For example, if you provide both a video and an audio-only version of each lecturem, you may choose to group by "Audio" and "Video." If you provide an audio track as well as both low-resolution video for handheld devices and high-resolution video for desktop viewing, you may name your groups "Audio," "Video | iPod" and "Video | Desktop."

Category

The category is a pre-defined list of possible podcast topics determined by iTunes. You must use one of iTunes categories listed at the following URL.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html#categories

The category will be associated with the entire podcast series, not individual episodes.

Name

The name is a unique name for each podcast episode. Because the album/podcast name also appears, it is unnecessary to put the name of the course in the file name. We recommend that you enter the date, and/or a name for the podcast to help students organize the series: DATE + OPTIONAL LECTURE NAME (e.g., "September 2, 2008" or "9/2/08 Why Do People Write?")

Artist

We recommend that the"Artist" field indicate the faculty name (FIRSTNAME LASTNAME) (e.g., "Horace White" or "Horace White & Simone Poltz"). You will usually use your own names(s), but may enter alternate names for some podcasts to reflect students doing presentations, or for guest speakers.

Comments

The comments field can contain a short amount of text to annotate your podcast episode. We recommend you use this field for copyright information, contact information, or other content you would like associated with each podcast episode.

Genre

Because iTunes has a limited number of pre-defined genres, we recommend that users limit themselves to the appropriate campus name as listed below. This has an additional benefit of allowing students to quickly limit their iTunes library to university content.

University of Minnesota - Crookston

University of Minnesota - Duluth

University of Minnesota - Morris

University of Minnesota - Rochester

University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

University of Minnesota (for intercampus collaborations)

Lyrics

We recommend that the lyrics field be used to enter transcripts or summaries of the session. This field is only offered for audio content, so we encourage you to consider also uploading audio-only content of video content to attach a transcript or summary.

Artwork

Your artwork is a 300 x 300 image in JPG format associated with a podcast series or an individual episode. You may choose a picture that illustrates the topic of the course, a headshot of yourself, or a deparmental logo.

Disk Number

If you choose to continue using a single podcast series for multiple semesters, you may want to use the Disk Number to indicate each successive semester (starting with 1 and incrementing for each subsequent session). You may also use the Disk Number as an organizational strategy for units within a single session. However, you may also just leave this field blank.

Track Number

You may consider entering each lecture number in the series, particularly even if they are dated in the Name field. This will help students list them in the proper order, since iTunes will organize the Name field alphabetically.

Questions and Unresolved Issues

• Note that while our strategy for using fields may help students find and organize content, students are at liberty to change the fields to facilitate their own personal strategies for doing so. It may be interesting to follow up with students to see if they have recommendations based on the systems they've developed for organizing and labeling content.
  
• Will U Relations or collegiate/departmental communication groups have additional requirements or recommendations for public content?
  
• The subcommittee on IP may have recommendations on language for the copyright statement we're suggesting for inclusion in the Comments field.