What I Like About YouTube

Greetings!

YouTube is way cool! I have been visiting it for a couple of years now on at least a monthly basis. I was initially sent there by a friend's email and once I started looking around I was hooked. There are so many entertaining, sentimental, and educational things out there that it would be easy to get lost in time and find, suddenly, that it is four hours later ( Not that I'm writing from personal experience here. [Dictionaries have the same effect on me -- if I were writing from personal experience, mind you.]). The charming thing about YouTube is that it makes everyone a filmmaker, so there is a great democratizing effect. You don't have to be rich or famous to put together a "film" that gets a lot of visits. Also, if there was something you saw on television that you really liked and thought it might be gone forever, it probably exists on YouTube somewhere. One of the downsides of YouTube is that it is duplicative. There are many posts of the same thing -- like the Medieval Help Desk which I posted in my previous blog. The search strings seem to be very intuitive so that if you want to see, for example, those funny California cow commercials, you can type in California cows and get to some of them and one thing leads to another in YouTube sort of like citation indexing. I'm more familiar with YouTube as a source for video clips than as a social networking site although I could see where it could be that as well. As to its usefulness to public libraries, I think that it is a lot like MySpace and FaceBook. It is where a lot of people are or where they visit regularly and if you are going to market your product and try to attract more customers, then you need to go where the people are. Having a YouTube account makes a lot of sense, but only with the caveat that I trot out every time I opine about all the wonderful new technology we've been playing with, that it has to be some staff members job (not an added-on job, but their actual job) to keep the content fresh, up-to-date, and new. Novelty (what a novel idea for an institution that deals with novels en masse) drives consumer interest and thus library visits. If the customer never knows what new and exciting thing they might encounter at your library or on your library's web site(or other web presences) they'll keep coming back. I also think that if libraries are going to invest the dollars to have a web presence that there needs to be a way to count that activity ( I know, there are hit counters)and use it with funding sources and that means an ability to compare your level of activity to other libraries of a like size. The library produced movies -- like the Harper College Tour-- worked really well because they were humorous, poked fun at some stereotypes, actually got across their message, were short and pithy, and had good production qualities. I don't think any library should post something that looks like "The Blair Witch Project" unless you are actually doing a homage / send up of that film. I think that's all I have to say on the subject -- at least for now!

The Rat has spoken!