Why YouTube is useful ...

Still sick ...

I was rather suspicious of YouTube as a useful resource, seeing it as sub version of the "You have been framed" genre which I guess shows a certain amount of snobbery about Web 2.0 social media and networking. Yet with some circumspection and concessions to "Simon's Cat" I discovered that is much of value to be found.

The home page initially confirmed my suspicions with its broad hierarchy of searchable fields of reflecting popular culture and shared with the other social media sites already experienced such as blogs, podcasts Delicious and Flickr. They include cars and vehicles, comedy, entertainment and, pets and animals. It also offers similar functionality to Flickr, Delicious, blogs and podcasts; options to view a history, play lists and favourites and opportunities to share the arcane gem or two. I need to investigate the difference between playlists and favourites. Rather like Amazon it offers recommended viewing some of which did seem a little off the mark. There are the obligatory adverts.

I used the search term Victorian and came with Emma's Victorian Jane Austen film (sic), references to Victoria Beckham, music from the motion picture "The Young Victoria" This didn't seem a promising start.

The refining of terms brought up "Victorian Music" a bit of misnomer, and "The Victorian Farm". How legal were these episodes of the BBC series of this name? Victorian Houses revealed many examples of American real estate! Already feeling nauseous the Victorian merry-go-round and barrel organ was not a good idea!I plumped for Victorian hairstyles. Unfortunately no sound accompanied these videos. The poster of these videos obviously has a thing about hair and hairstyles just see what else Rbd4N has uploaded to YouTube. It's obviously a labour of love. "More info" identified the category in which these videos fell and these could lend to the exploration of more videos on a similar genre. The tags permit the identification of related sites and identify key concepts to identify further sites of interest, very much in the same way as those in "Delicious". It was helpful to have the full screen option and increase the definition of the videos. There were eight comments on the text of various degrees of helpfulness, one asking who girl in one of the photographs was, one remarking that the women in the photographs were now long dead which does in fact seem rather eerie and somewhat morbid. Rather more helpfully a commentator remarked that the hairstyles were more reminiscent of the Edwardian period. I think I concur with them. What this site demonstrates is the actual utility of YouTube for serious research. The site provides a collection of visual material gathered together in such a way that is impossible in the real world. It permits access to material that is ephemeral and difficult to locate through traditional classifications and catalogues. It archives a record of our visual culture past and present.

Still feeling ill, I pressed on to look at YouTubeEDU feeling that there might be useful educational material to be found there. Disappointingly, there were few UK institutions. It was helpful that the Open University and Imperial College shared the basic YouTube interface, including featured and related videos. I was impressed by the bright, clean and informative site of the Open University. Irritatingly the videos opened automatically and I difficulty working out how to close them. I was pleased to see that some of these were subtitled. The content was obviously geared to the taught courses of the Open University. There was a paucity of videos in the humanities. There was no indication as to copyright position of this material so I would hesitate to reuse this material. These material would be use resource for teaching and learning in the research community.

Distractedly, I searched the National Archive which is also to be found under the Education tab. I found this to be an excellent site. There are helpful but rather simplistic videos produced by the National Archives to aid readers and researchers in their use of the archives. These include, "Recording Research Results", "Ordering Documents", "Using the catalogues", "How records are arranged" and "The History of a document" What is more interesting are videos mixing documents and archival footage to tell a story. Fascinatingly, I found a a government information video entitled "Coughs and Sneezes" which reminded me why I stayed at home today. I have not included it in this blog but one Violet Szarbo instead. Once again I am unsure as the copyright position. Obviously the visual material to be found here is authoritative, well organised and of a high quality with the aim of meeting the demands of researchers at its heart

This exercise has been useful in identifying the range of visual material available on the Web. The various ways which it can be located and accessed. It has revealed how valuable visual media can be to the researcher. Questions of copyright remain unresolved.

Now I will retire to my much longed for sickbed.