I’ll bet you that most librarians you know are word people.  We love text.  But not everybody does.  The New York Times has a story recognizing that children and adults alike are increasingly using YouTube as their primary search engine.  As the child in the article says, Google is his second choice, only if he can’t find it on YouTube first.Given that YouTube content is rarely mediated (and, as far as I know, only for inappropriate content, not for its level of accuracy), this poses a potential problem for us librarians who prize accurate content.  (Suddenly, Wikipedia looks great to even its biggest critics because it has built-in mediation of content.) So what could this mean for us?

• We recognize that many people learn visually, even if we don’t.  Our collection development includes physical and digital resources for student and teacher checkout.  This is getting easier to do — many publishers are starting to package CDs or DVDs with books  
• We continue to promote our subscriptions to UnitedStreaming and point out outstanding video resources online such as PBS’s Teachers’ Domain.
• We recognize that fighting YouTube’s popularity is going to get us about as far as fighting Google did back in the late 90’s, and we extend the Web site evaluation strategies we use with students to include video.  We model “how to watch a video.”  (James Herring touched on the need for image and video evaluation in his 2008 IASL keynote in August.)
• We point out that TeacherTube or Totlol (which filters YouTube content in a separate Web site for kids) can have educationally useful material with less possibility of inapporpriate content. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Searching, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.