Wednesday, June 03, 2015

YouTube, social media, and academic libraries: building a digital collection



I recently presented at the Acquisitions Institute 2015 on a panel with Stacy Sieck (Taylor & Francis) and Zoe Pettway Unno (California State University - Fullerton's Pollack Library).  YouTube, social media, and academic libraries: building a digital collection, is a paper I had published in the Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship about YouTube as a new technology situated in the suite of emerging technologies.

YouTube’s extensive reach and integration in mainstream society as well as lifelong learning habits of online users cannot be understated.  My presentation continues on the theme of how YouTube collection at the University of British Columbia Library’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre has become an exciting extension of the digital collections and services.  By examining the history of traditional collection development at academic libraries, I really tried to demonstrate how YouTube fits into the long continuum of library media collections in an open-access platform.  Am I pushing the envelope, stretching the definition of "media collections"?  Perhaps, but I'd love to hear from you, too, on your thoughts.  Please feel free to share your comments with me!