About this project

In its fourth year CraftLit has been a labor of love for one person--me, Heather Ordover, the creator and host. Based on the volume and types of emails the show receives, a few things have become clear in the last year:

The majority of the listeners are women;

of those women, many are homeschooling mothers, new mothers who are home-bound, or women who have a lot of housework!

the other chunk of listeners fall into the "my hands are busy, but I love books" category;

people are hungry for classic fiction but either don't think they can understand those books on their own, or were turned off of them in high school.

Crafters usually stumble upon the podcast by word-of-mouth. Homeschools are a different matter.

Because homeschools are often loose networks of families, it is exceedingly time consuming to find and contact the groups to let them know this free podcast exists. It is equally difficult to get the word out to teacher organizations and other educational groups who might wish to use the podcast as an educational supplement as state standards drive out fiction in favor of nonfiction. I would like my assistant to spend some time locating, contacting, and giving information to these groups

The second thing I would like to have an assistant work on is to go back through the early episodes and clean up the audio. In the beginning of the 'cast it seemed as though I was speaking to 15 people and it didn't matter that I was learning how to record as I went. Now that I'm speaking to thousands, it would be best to make sure that the "learning curve" of the early days doesn't show as much. Because there are (as of today, 9.19.09) 144 40-60 minute episodes, this would be time consuming .

There is the further time constraint of updating and maintaining the website. Now that I'm teaching at the University, I find that I have fewer free hours to devote to learning code and playing on the web.

My hope is:

to find a student at the University where I teach who is computer literate, audio literate, and, honestly, just plain literate;

to hire her/him to edit the audio files;

to have him/her to search out homeschool and educational support sites that might want to know about a free podcast;

to have her/him send out a release to any appropriate parties and field any feedback from the release to have her/him update the web page as necessary.

I estimate there should be at least 350 hours of work to be done on the short end, it could be as much as 500 depending on how difficult it is to fix audio and find educational venue contact information (you'd be surprised).