"YouTube if you want to"

- wrote Hazel Blears to Gordon Brown after she very publicly resigned from his cabinet.  She went on to say

But it's no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre.

Now, libraries and politics tend to mix quite well, but politics and the internet is normally thoroughly divisive/exasperating/not worth it, especially on this particular blog, so the politics of this example is not going any further.  What I wanted to note was this very famous example of criticism of YouTube as one-way traffic of communication.  You can't ask YouTube and you can't get a tailored service, YouTube gives information on what the creator wanted to give information about.

In libraries, this is very useful.  Imagine walking into the library to photocopy for the first time and being able to watch an explanation of how to buy credit and use the machine on your smartphone or tablet.  Similarly, imagine watching videos about your library's classification system to make it easier to find a book.  This is really useful, but when it comes to 'why do I have that library fine' you really need to talk to someone in person.  Video technology certainly does have a role to play, although it is easy when preparing to make a video to view all users as homogeneous.  In reality there are numerous specific factors that will alter every users library experience. 

For information literacy, specifically advice on finding, using, digesting, referencing information effectively, videos can be very helpful.  This video (on 23thingscity blog)



is absolutely superb.  But why?  Well, I'm inclined to say its because of the production values.  It is exceptionally well made, and is more authoritative as a result.  Unless you make your video deeply ironic, or take off a 70's kids TV show it just looks a bit lame.  Any library that wants to invest in making videos that are engaging and informative need to seriously consider the quality of the sound and the images.  If the sound is poor then why not use slideshare and upload a presentation.  If the images are no good then why not make a podcast?  Both have to work together and be high quality to make your library look professional; it's not about staff having fun making the thing, its about the end user.

I really like this video, the music reminds me of Pinny's House, but I'm left wishing she had gone to more effort to make the text legible and didn't have the tacky end.  If she'd perfected the video it would work so very much better.



One of the things I love about librarians is their drive to be excellent, to learn how to do new things, and their ability to stay one step ahead, and a lot of librarians I know would make fantastic videos.  To those I hope they do, and use these videos as a dynamic presentation tool both online and included as part of their training sessions.  To those who can't YouTube, then I advise that they simply stick to the presentation.  In either case the training session is still key, because videos about information literacy are bound to throw up some quite specific questions for users who are digesting the information and making it applicable to them.