Media Sharing

I think that there is a great potential for libraries to use sites like Flickr and YouTube to upload pictures and videos to promote events, provide access to archived images, information literacy tutorials, and capturing storytelling events. Looking at the case studies this week, the videos that were uploaded on YouTube seemed quite professional in my opinion and I didn't cringe nearly as much as I thought I would. It's great that there are talented individuals in libraries who are able to be creative enough and have enough acting abilities to create these videos. I'm afraid I'm lacking in both of these areas. But, maybe that's just because I haven't gotten over the "leave it to the experts" mentality and had the courage to delve into these new areas.

Media sharing is much like the other applications that we've studied in that I think librarians need to first address a service need for their patrons then evaluate whether or not any web 2.0 applications provide the right tools to fill that need. It seems as though alot of libraries are still playing around with these new ideas (which is awesome, and I think very beneficial!) and besides providing instructional videos and access to archived images not alot of need for media sharing. Although, the idea of broadcasting storytelling and events/speakers so that patrons who can't make it into the library to see them can also be a good idea. In the 16 ways to use Flickr at your library it all seemed to be ways to promote the library except for "12. Create WIKIS OR INSTRUCTIONAL WEB SITES for staff on library technical topics."- which I didn't understand the relevancy to Flickr (can anyone help me out on this one?)

All in all, I think that media sharing is an important concept for librarians to keep in their toolkit whether it be using it to promote the library or library instruction,  or teaching patrons how to use it themselves.