My librarian friends think that because I work in an academic law library, I don’t get to meet the – let’s say eccentric- people that frequent libraries. I always respond, “Not only do we get them, but our patrons have legal problems on top of it.”
HeinOnline has created a YouTube Channel where they are posting training videos on how to use their databases. What a great idea! And one that I will totally use! Especially since I haven’t had time to get back to TASC and make my Westlaw/Lexis videos!
Sorry for the overuse of exclamation points. I’m a little jetlagged and loopy this morning.
There was a point in time when this applied to me, but now I’m just a recreational user. Now I only facebook on weekends and special occassions and to take the edge off of a really bad day at work…..
I really like my job. Not because I get to do really interesting mentally stimulating things or because I like helping people (both true, btw), but also because my boss sends me stuff like this:
After I got finish watching it, I started poking around and it looks like the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library has entire YouTube Channel with mostly funny and creative book reviews, but also some behind-the-scenes stuff. I poked around some more, and found a couple more libraries with YouTube channels.
Yes, three of the four are from Kentucky. That was completely unintentional. For some reason Kentucky libraries seem to be really into the Web 2.0. I think it’s because the state is so spread out and rural once you leave the Golden Triangle, that we’re all gravitating online to make connections. Also, most of these Web 2.0 apps are free or otherwise inexpensive and if you’ve been following the Kentucky news, we ain’t got no money no more. But I digress…
There also seems to be a high proportion of public libraries. The only academic one (in my admittedly two minutes of looking) I could find is from Otis College, and that’s not actually the library’s channel – they just have added some content to the college’s collection. It’s also an art/design college, so they may be more inclined to creative outlets like this.
The obvious uses I could see for this for my situation (an academic law library) is to do video library tours and to upload screen casts of database trainings. I guess we could do book reviews, but I don’t think that even I on my most wired and hyper days could make Nimmer on Copyright sound exciting.
As I was cruising through my blog RSS feeds this afternoon, my attention was caught by the post title, “Sexy Librarians of the Future Will Help You Upload Your Videos to YouTube” from ReadWriteWeb. Here’s a cut/paste of the post that discusses an interview with Microsoft’s Jon Udell (and the post links to the audio of the interview):
Udell posits that the librarian of the future will help a growing number of citizen media producers to classify their online media and get it connected to other related content in ways that will increase its discoverability. That is hot…
Imagine a future when you go to the library with a 5 minute video you’ve just made about last night’s Presidential debates and that librarian says to you:
You should upload it to YouTube and tag it with these four tags – two broad and two more specific to existing communities of interest on YouTube and the topic of your video. Then you should embed that video in a blog post along with some text introducing it and linking to some of your favorite posts by other people who have also written today about the Presidential debates. Make sure to send trackbacks to those posts!Now, I think this is a particularly good video on the topic, so if you’re interested I will vote for it on StumbleUpon (as a sexy librarian I have a very powerful account there) and give it a good summary explanation. Any of those are steps you can take that will make your work all the easier for people to discover.
Would that be great, or what?
I would not classify myself as “sexy”, however, if a patron came to my library with a video they created and wanted to post it on the Internet, I would be ready to tell them the above. The real problem is letting patrons know that we can help them do this.
The Technological Tortoise 