Youtube

Hi
Well I love Youtube and all these free videos. They can be quite amusing and useful for whiling away a bit or a lot of time. Like all of these web services they range from perile rubbish to educative and very interesting to the individual. I would, however, expect a very different continuum of titles for each individual. I think there is immense capacity for those interested in a topic for research.

I must say I liked the video of library dominos, but it doesn't beat the Wonder Women episode where she knocked all the Library of Congress shelving into a domino with one kick.

But for something serious, I like the set out of Yahoo videos.If you search for Information Literacy, you get a lot of titles. I particularly like the approach in a video called Discovery Information Literacy (~8mins). another video called What is IL? also provides useful background (also ~8mins). Sunny's Speech (1 min) was an interesting study in bad classroom management, with Sunny up the front, obviously trying to lecture using a screen with invisible text. Sunny couldn't be heard and the class was consequently playing around with each other out of control. A useful training video.

From Google video I noticed that education videos had the longest durations per title, often longer than 1 hour. The Facebook lecture was useful and maybe should be explored by academic libraries as it is aimed at campuses. A benefit for students using Facebook is that it can organise friends in class groups.

GoogleTech Talks are worth a look also, with many useful topics covered. Customizing Collections was a video that I liked, as it provided an historical context for where collections are headed from an humanities point of view.

Youtube has some great music clips, and not just modern teenage. I found some great stuff on American folk songs such as Pete Seeger and the Weavers.

Social networking is certainly alive and well in video land and the question about whether serious stuff should be included as well is often asked. Does this mysterious group of social networkers want to mix social and serious stuff. I suspect that 'they' is a very diverse group, just as the content is diverse and so there is a place for all types of content. I think that usage statistics on categories or types of topic would be a nice feature for those with a research bent. The platform allows for searching by keyword which is great when trying to locate material.

I have chosen the Discover Information Literacy video to illustrate that I can embedd the HTML required to save a video to my Blog.