[Asis-l] UNC at Chapel Hill/SILS /YouTube offer academic video content

[wanda monroe]

Since its beginnings in 2005, YouTube has been known as a major source of 
online video entertainment, racking up billions of visits and hosting 
everything from music videos to strangely hypnotic clips of laughing 
babies. Until recently, however, “academic” content on YouTube was 
mostly limited to in-depth how-tos or the occasional commencement speech.

YouTube’s reputation as an entertainment-only venue began to change late 
in 2007 when several higher educational institutions began cooperating with 
the online video community to serve truly academic content like classroom 
lectures and hosted talks. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 
was among the first universities to work with YouTube to offer UNC-produced 
content via the site.

Gary Marchionini, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor at UNC’s 
School of Information and Library Science (SILS), led the efforts to get 
video productions created at UNC at Chapel Hill on YouTube (see 
http://www.youtube.com/uncchapelhill).

The effort began when Marchionini proposed a video series titled 
“Information in Life” and, with support from YouTube, developed the 
series in 2007. The idea was to record lectures on key information topics 
presented by SILS faculty, guest speakers and students and to augment these 
lectures with interviews with faculty from SILS and the UNC campus.

SILS students Larry Taylor, Brenn Hill, Nicholas Johnson and Travis Roscher 
worked with Marchionini to record presentations and interviews and to 
design the site. Recorded presentations ranged from SILS professors giving 
intimate talks, to prominent speakers like Cory Doctorow presenting large 
lectures. Interviews consisted of a set of questions about the scholars’ 
research and teaching and the roles that information plays in their work.

When recordings were complete, they were packaged with a short credit 
screen developed for the series that includes a fugue created by Taylor 
that morphs from piano to synthesizer. A simple metadata template is used 
to describe each video and the recordings are compressed for upload. The 
files and the corresponding metadata were then sent to YouTube and appeared 
on the UNC “channel.”

There are currently more than 100 videos—approximately 75 hours of 
content—in the Information in Life Series, with more than 60 lectures by 
SILS faculty, students and visitors and two dozen interviews with UNC 
faculty in fields ranging from public health and pharmacy to folklore and 
popular culture.

Based on the work to develop the Information in Life series, the UNC 
YouTube channel was expanded to incorporate the entire campus community and 
include videos produced outside of SILS. There are currently more than 250 
videos now available in different playlists on the UNC channel.

The UNC/YouTube relationship proved so successful that management of the 
channel is currently transitioning to the campus Department of University 
Relations. The Information in Life Series will continue to add lectures.

The videos are free and available for use in multiple ways, including 
classroom settings, home-schooling, research and more. SILS encourages use 
and reuse of the materials available and promotes frequent visits to the 
site to view the latest additions.

About YouTube
-------------
YouTube is the leading online video community that allows people to 
discover, watch and share originally created videos. YouTube allows people 
to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the 
Internet through Web sites, blogs and e-mail.

*******************************************
Wanda Monroe
Director of Communications
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
100 Manning Hall
Campus Box 3360
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360
Phone: 919.843.8337
Web site: sils.unc.edu