Thing 18 -- YouTube and Other Online Video

After viewing the video clips posted in this Thing, and doing some searching of my own in both YouTube and Yahoo Videos, I decided to post the above clip in this blog entry. It's a video clip from one of the concerts given at Aurora's Northern Lights Music Festival in the summer of 2006. I enjoy classical music, and having the annual festival in Aurora is a great delight to me--so I figured I'd share the clip with anyone else reading who might be interested.

I did other searches of local interest in both sites I searched, as well (of course!) a number of searches related to library topics. One thing I looked for was how other libraries were using YouTube to promote early literacy and their story times. I found several video clip commercials for various library story times as well as some video clips about early literacy and its importance. I also found various video clip commercials for teen reading programs. If we do get a Teen Advisory Group at our library, I might well introduce this idea and see if teens think that posting a video promoting the Teen Reading Program would be an effective way to encourage local teens to get involved.

I could think of any number of ways that video clips on library web sites could be useful--video tutorials of the basics of searching the library catalog and reference databases, promotions for library events, booktalking, etc. As many of our users still have dial-up internet access, however, I am careful about what I put on the library's web site so that it does not take so long to load that it discourages patrons from using it at all.

Other thoughts on my brief online video experience....as expected, I found rather more in YouTube than in Yahoo Videos....I noted that phrase searching using quotation marks worked in YouTube and did not seem to work as well in Yahoo Videos....the relevancy seemed more on target in YouTube than in Yahoo Videos....in both cases, I would have very much appreciated the ability to use the "NOT" Boolean operator to weed out things that, while they included my search terms, did not match what I was looking for.

The other thing I wondered about, and did a bit more searching on, was online video and copyright issues. In the case of the video I posted, the composer and performer is the one who posted the video, so there are clearly no copyright issues. I did wonder about how fair use came into play with people posting video clips of performances they had attended, or background music used for various video clips. One of the story time videos I found videotaped reading an entire picture book, with close-ups of the pictures on each page; that one raised fair use flags for me. I would want to do more research on copyright issues before posting anything about which I had any doubts.