Thing #21

You Tube

I find it hard to browse on You Tube unless you use the Advanced Search and try to narrow down what you are looking for when you are searching for something vague but that's true of a lot of search engines and "databases". The Advanced Search even lets you use Boolean Logic. That came in handy when I was doing a search on "Jerry Springer" AND Cincinnati. The worst thing about the site is that some videos have better video and audio quality than others. Also because of all the lawsuits over who owns the content a lot of videos disappear so if you are linking to material from the entertainment and music industries you'll need to constantly make sure the version you linked to is still available on the site.

From the looks of it a lot of libraries have put their tutorials on You Tube. It makes sense to share the instructional work you've done with anyone else who might get something useful out of it. Libraries are supposed to be about sharing information and although on the surface You Tube appears to be something entertaining or a way to waste time it can be a good resource for sharing "serious" things. If your library itself doesn't offer tutorials and your patrons use Google to find everything (like so many do), then they may just stumble upon a useful tutorial from a reputable source on You Tube.

Here's a brief tutorial about using MeSH Terms and Search History in Pub Med

Also, this video is really useful for teaching people how to embed a You Tube video directly into a Power Point presentation so when the slide with the video comes up, the video automatically starts playing. I've shown this to several students who were wondering how to do this. How "meta" :a You Tube video about You Tube. :)

Now here's a fun one: Cookie Monster in the Library.
For some reason when I tried to embed this, it was leaving the "value" parameter empty and Blogger wouldn't let me put the url in to fix the code.