Thing 18 - Explore YouTube and other video sites

I just love YouTube! It's such a great forum to get messages (and entertainment) to people, to share in a social environment. Video-sharing is definitely a Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 thing to do.

Here's the video that I selected for my blog: it's one of the videos that the ALA made in honor of National Library Week. I think it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen.




I looked for other videos with the tag of "library card" and found a cute one from the television show "Arthur" ("Having fun isn't hard...When you've got a library card!").

I really enjoyed all of the videos in this Thing. I'd seen most of them before, but some were new to me, like the hilarious "Library Musical." Part of the beauty of the musical video was seeing the reactions of the library patrons to the "prank," both during and after--very sweet.

The "Web 2.0 Directory: Econsultant" site ( http://web2.econsultant.com/ ) is terrific - I added it to my "Interesting Links" on this blog, and I also grabbed the RSS feed for my Bloglines account.

I really think video is important to a library website, and can convey so much of the values, mission, intelligence, and sense of humor of a library and its personnel. Video is a real common denominator in our society; it's a medium that most individuals can utilize (even the visually-impaired can enjoy the audio component). Services like YouTube make it seem fairly easy to incorporate video, and I think that the opportunity should be taken.