Last week, YouTube launched an educational section where videos from colleges and universities have been posted. There is a lot of content from major American universities already: Stanford has more than 500 videos, MIT has nearly 900 and several hundred from Harvard. Thus far, I have not seen anything there from any institution in Canada or the United Kingdom (or indeed, anywhere outside the USA). While such projects certainly offer education more broadly, I wonder what the goal is. Are the universities trying to promote themselves? So far, there is a mix of lectures, special events and some PR material. I wonder if librarians are involved in making this happen and curating the YouTube presence? These are points to return to at some later point.
One more YouTube note before I get down to work. The Library of Congress now has a channel on YouTube with about 70 videos. The Library itself also has a blog post explaining their strategy and some of the planning that went into this project. I would love to see more Canadian institutions get involved in similar projects – there are plenty of large audio-visual archives that should think about this more. I think it is also significant that the Library has put copies of this material on a public place like YouTube rather than keeping it in a content island on their own website. Half the battle in projects like this is making the resources and content easy for users to discover and use. Users should not need to radically alter their habits to simply find information resources. This is one reason why I think podcasts (using RSS, the iTunes Music Store etc) are a good way to distribute content – people can obtain it when they wish by whatever method they wish.
I’m starting to think about distribution projects like this more. Where can we add value? There are at least two broad ways to do this. Librarians (and related professionals such as archivists) understand quality issues and preservation – their digitized projects are likely to be of high quality (and thus pleasant to use). In addition, we can bring our classic set of skills – indexing, cataloguing etc – to make these resources easy for people to find. I would also hope that we can measure the effectiveness of our cataloguing to see what type of indexing resonates with people (e.g. do people find the content by tags or do they prefer to search based on title? Or some other criteria?). The basic data to answer that kind of question should be easy to obtain – analyzing it will be more difficult but the pay off will be in more responsive cataloguing that makes sense to users. This sort of ongoing evaluation of cataloguing effectiveness is difficult to do in traditional book cataloguing, but easier to do in digital cataloguing.
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