You Tube-The good, the bad and the painful

As per our 2.0 directions for the week I went to You Tube and looked for library related film clips. The first one I watched was a short advertisement for Eoin Colfer's book Airman. It was sorta like watching a movie preview, only it was for a book.

The next movie I watched was a training video about promoting the use of the public libraries as a resource for folks with special needs. It was boring and even thought it's been up for a year there were only 584 views.

The Future of Libraries was very poorly done. The lighting was bad, the picture was blurry, and it was shot from a strange angle so one was looking up the speaker's nose. It went on to show a women who was speaking in an extremely noisy environment, and eventually there were people messing about with table cloths in the background - pretty bizarre place to tape a video that you want to present to the public on You Tube.

Libraries in 2010 was disturbing. They used a futuristic spoof in the front part with the threat of public humiliation and public execution of librarians who didn't do their jobs well. The last minute or so read "But seriously" while the speaker talked about realistic information with no new visuals. The sound was bad and I found it offensive rather than funny.

The Book Cart Drill team, otherwise known as the Pitt Crew from the University of Pittsburg School of Information Sciences, was an energetic group competing in a some sort of contest. I'm sure that it would have been fun to see live, but it didn't transfer well from live to Internet content.

Next I moved on to more personal interests - namely locals who I know. Amy Walker did the 21 accents a couple of months ago on You Tube and ended up on the Today Show. She was from Langley and I've seen her in many a high school plays, as well as theatrical productions at Whidbey Children's Theater and Whidbey Island Center for the Arts. She had a new short clip about making the 21 Accents video.

Brian Moote grew up on Whidbey Island and he is now living in Boston and going to college there. He is also a comedian. There is a ten minute clip of him at the Legendary Comedy Studio in Harvard Square which was made April 6, 2008. I was the 11th viewer!

I next looked up Katrina Kittle, an author that I enjoy, and she had a clip in which she was being interviewed by choosing a question from a big red bowl. I enjoyed it because it's fun to know more about her. She lives in the Dayton, Ohio area and that's close to where I grew up.

Hulu was next. I looked at short clips from Leave it to Beaver, the characters from The Adams Family, and a short clip from a Simpsons episode. I had forgotten how young the Beav was in the television series! Of course it played for a while so maybe he was older by the time I started watching it.

Fancast was interesting with lots of TV shows and movies that looked interesting. I found myself thinking that I could now understand how people sit in front of their computers for hours each day. There truly is endless entertainment available.

In terms of how these sites might be of use for libraries, it seems that it could be very helpful in answering certain kinds of reference questions.

Certain kinds of information could be filmed and put on You Tube for public viewing. However, what I found was that a lot of the clips truly are painful to watch - they are boring and poorly done. In fact, they are not conducive to watching the entire thing. If Sno-Isle were to produce anything for You Tube, it needs to be well done or it is not worth doing.