20. Discover YouTube and a few sites that allow users to upload and share videos.
I’m already pretty familiar with YouTube and it’s time-suckage abilities. Whenever I find myself on YouTube, suddenly I look at the clock and an hour has gone by. I had actually already embedded a video in my blog, but I did so again on the post immediately before this one. I chose the video I did because earlier in the week, I downloaded Google Earth to my computer at home. I located my house, my parents house, my apartment in Chicago, and was marveling at the capabilities of this tool. I decided to try to find evidence of mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky, and I did, simply by searching for Whitesburg, KY and moving the view around in that area. It was very disturbing; most of those areas of grey or brown in the green mountains are mountaintop removal sites. In case you don’t know, mountaintop removal is a relatively new mining technique where they blow the tops off mountains to get at the coal underneath and then dump the dirt into the valley next to the mountain, usually smothering the waterways in the valleys. There is a good diagram here from the folks at Mountain Justice Summer. It’s very harmful for the water, causes erosion and flooding, creates many devastating environmental conditions, and employs significantly less miners than any other mining technique. Okay, I didn’t mean to get onto an environmental lecture here, but that’s why I put the Appalachian Voices video on my blog.
As for how to use it in the library, I think using it at all will improve library visibility. Since a few of HCPL’s staff day videos are already up there, I’m sure people have gone into YouTube, searched for Harford County, and found our staff day video. A scary prospect to some, but this simple presence is good advertising, provided it’s nothing, um, inappropriate. Another idea comes from my former library, the Lexington Public Library; they created a commercial for their summer reading program which can be viewed here. YouTube is fun, but can also be very useful and educational, it all depends on how you search it. While the impression seems to be it’s all fun and games, there are plenty of interesting and even educational videos on YouTube…unfortunately it’s blocked by many school district’s computers, which prevents teachers and librarians from accessing all of this available information.
