I recently came across “Is YouTube the Next Google?” at ReadWriteWeb and it got me thinking. Especially the part:
Whenever his son needed any information, he would open up YouTube, type in the search term and then just watch the videos that showed up as matches. He never Googled anything; he never went to any other site; his entire web experience was confined to YouTube videos.
Shortly after, the author tries a few searches and quickly realizes that the search results are not so great for every topic. Even then, it is possible to find a lot of information through video clips you find in YouTube. Here’s a basic search for “search for scholarly articles” and you can find a lot of tutorials on how to identify and search for articles.
Here is a clip about a basic title search using the library catalog that I used as an experiment to complement a e-mail reference question.
I just happened to use YouTube to host the clip because it was free, but I didn’t even think about how it might end up in the public. This took me 10 minutes to make, which is about how long it takes me to write a detailed written instructions in an e-mail anyway. Eventually, with librarians adding more video tutorials to YouTube, will it get to the point where any basic library question might be answered by a YouTube clip? Will it ever get to the point where anything you can possibly search for will also have a video clip associated with it in the future?
Ken,
I absolutely agree with the notion of YouTube being a great place to find information. In two recent classes I attended (accounting and statistics, neither of which comes naturally to me), I used YouTube to view various professors’ lectures on topics I did not fully understand in class.
And I also used YouTube to learn how to change the coolant tempertaure sensor on a 1996 Saturn. The amount of “how-to” material on YourTube is amazing and we should use it as a channel to help our students, faculty and staff.
Thanks for the post!
-Don