On Sunday I was fooling around on the web while my husband watched the Super Bowl. I didn’t have any desire to watch the game, but when he was totally entertained by the Doritos commercial, and then later, when people on twitter started talking about the Hulu ad I was happy to be able to easily find and watch them online. That’s how I generally use YouTube and similar video sites; I go looking for something I heard about somewhere, your typical known-item search.
When we decided to focus on video this month though, I knew immediately I wanted to talk about this post from ReadWriteWeb and this anecdote in particular:
“Whenever his [9-year old] son needed any information, he would open up YouTube, type in the search term and then just watch the videos that showed up as matches. He never Googled anything; he never went to any other site; his entire web experience was confined to YouTube videos.”
I found this fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever gone straight to YouTube to search for information, but here’s a kid who doesn’t even “Google it,” he “YouTubes it.” Now, I’m not going to use this story to make any big predictions about how when these kids come to college they’ll be expecting to find what they need to know about the library in video form. I suspect for most kids who use YouTube this way it’s about what they’re looking for as well as where they are with their reading skills, both things I would expect to change pretty drastically in the next 10 years. But it’s not just kids who use YouTube (or if it is, they’re using it like crazy.) YouTube made the news this fall when it was reported to beat out Yahoo for the title of #2 search engine. We could spend some time talking about whether it makes sense to call YouTube a search engine, whether Google has influenced the trend, and looking at the numbers, whether or not this can even be called a trend, but I think we can agree on one thing; there are a lot of people searching for stuff in YouTube.
I also think there may be some opportunities for libraries to be responsive to the people (of any age) who use YouTube as a first stop when they’re looking for information, but I suspect it will need to go beyond the “how to find a book” tutorials into the territory of providing some actual content. It would be nice to catch the people who aren’t looking for library information but might be interested in a reminder of what we have to offer. For example, when I used to work at our local public library I often handed out a guide to gardening resources geared to our local (challenging) climate. How cool would it be to have a short video featuring a local gardening guru demonstrating how to protect plants from summer frost? (Yes, we have such a thing as summer frost here.) The video could end with a plug for the additional resources available in the library. Academic libraries could feature favorite professors sharing a short tip about a popular research topic, then mentioning some of the journals, databases, or other resources they like to use for their own research in that area.
We could call them “long READ posters” (ht to “flickr’s long photos.”)
Email This Post to a Friend
I like your suggestions about library produced videos that aren’t overtly library related - other people talking about something of local interest, with a tie-in to library resources at the end. My library has a big car repair section - maybe i could put together something involving people in the community, or a local car show, or something like that…
What about YouTube “bibliographies” created by librarians or with input from library users. These could be just for fun or used to highlight ways YouTube can be used to make school reports more interesting. I’ve found speeches by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on youtube and I found a short clip of a Chinese woman unbinding her feet to use as a “hook” in a booktalk of “Ties that Bind Ties that Break” by Lensey Namioka.
A few days before reading that (fascinating) RWW article, I found my 14-yr-old YouTubing for information on/assistance with, of all things, a certain type of algebra problem in her homework. She was watching a video of some guy teaching a similar problem–and very likely had NOT watched her in-real-life teacher teach the same thing in person earlier that day. I didn’t say anything to her, just noticed. So interesting.
Sam, I’ve always thought I should learn to change my own oil, but haven’t. I never thought to look for a video tutorial, but I just checked and of course there are bunches, some better than others, of course. I was pretty disappointed by what popped up first when I searched for stuff like “help with research paper” though–first video was from some guy helpfully promoting his term paper site as a place to get some ideas and then reminding everyone to “put it in your own words!” Ugh. Jenny, your idea of making video bibliographies might help to address the quality problem–it wouldn’t necessarily reach the people who were searching on YouTube first, but it would certainly be an interesting addition to homework help pages, subject research guides and the like. Our course page builder program (Library a la Carte, to put in a plug :)) has the option to embed YouTube videos and I did use it once for a collection of clips about the World Bank, I totally forgot. No word on whether the students found it useful though.
Emily, all I can say is I wish that had been an option when I took algebra! It always made sense in class, but sometimes when I got home…it would also have been very useful in trigonometry when I had a teacher who refused to help me because he thought I should “figure it out on my own” (not that I’m still irritated by that or anything….)
I think video bibliographies could be really interesting - lately I’ve been doing book lists over the at the One Minute Critic - some are humorous, but I’m trying some different angles. I was also thinking about creating resource lists - books and magazines, etc. - for certain types of topics, like “Going Green” and giving a list of six or seven books and a couple of magazines and some websites.