#18: YouTube

I have a friend who sends me all kinds of videos every day, so I had already seen the one about the 'new technology' called books, and the March of the Librarians, and the blonde library joke (That one's on my sidebar). But the library dominos were new to me, and very cool. I loved the parody of Mac/PC commercials in the IT vs. Librarian clip.

This is my current favorite right now:


We should probably keep an eye on this future patron with our magazine collection...
Seriously, though, how can you NOT laugh, right along with him? What a day-brightener!

This is an interesting aside: One of our library computers didn't have the required software to play some of the YouTube videos mentioned, so I pulled them up on my ipod touch. It was kind of weird to be blogging on a PC, about something I was watching on my ipod.

I thought the library tour video was very well done and looked very polished, considering it was just still photos with captions, transitions, and a musical background. It looked like it would be very doable. I like the idea of having a very short library tour available on our public PCs. Or maybe a short catalog instruction video. Or a video directing patrons to our online resources, with a short intro about what each has to offer. There are lots of instructional kinds of uses that could be just a click away on our public PCs. But since bandwidth is such an issue in our building already, I don't see that being a viable option any time soon. Maybe someday!

I find it very easy to spend a lot of time with YouTube. I tend to gravitate towards funny animal videos. It's a nice escape, but could potentially be a time-waster for me at home! No danger of that at work, since the videos are so painfully slow in loading and playing, plus we can't really use sound in the public areas. I see a lot of kids on our public PCs with headphones, patiently waiting for a YouTube video to load. I guess they have more time to kill than we do...