Conference | Video, Education, and Open Content

Peter Brantley, Appreciating the new role of video in education

miss Peter Bradley and I’m the executive director or something dlf is a member organization of large research libraries along with the Library of Congress National Archives

the British Library Oxford and we also have some a line numbers such as icpsr just scanned a few others so I just want to use this brief time to try to talk about some of the challenges that video

poses for digital libraries and in essence this is really a dialogue for me with the larger community is I struggle to figure out the role of video in the realm of digital library production and

distribution and engagement so my thoughts here or extremely preliminary in the really Metro spark of much longer term conversations I actually want to very briefly show if I can this nice

little video that some of you may have seen but I just want to proselytize it briefly this is from Stanford and it’s called a fairy use tail and it’s a mash-up of excerpts of Disney films of

designed to educate people about what fair use is I won’t let this run through to completion but if you haven’t seen it I just want to introduce it to you very briefly

if you can read the FBI warning it’s also a joke allow citizens to reproduce distribute or exhibit portions of copyrighted motion pictures what the heck is coffee right what you

want the heck is copy copy it’s that long that’s the problem you know the law that stupid law what the heck is coffee fight I’ll tell you copy fight is a permanently hoechst original mark what a

permanently hoechst the original walk in in in some format can be seen or heard hmm now listen this is important Oh lick the copy right owner asked God right to use their work it’s mine how can that be

that’s not fair it’s forbidden to use a copy right work without permission granted by the copyright owner I’m sorry buddy who’s foolish enough to threaten our coffee right has broken the law

aren’t we forgetting one teensy-weensy but ever so crucial did for tiny detail you’d better be able to pay for that coffee fight permission we haven’t discussed the subject of payment you

can’t get something for nothing you know but I don’t have I’m not asking mouth just a token way via trifle hold on bagger are you saying this is about money I’m sorry sir I don’t have any

money successfully I prefer the term capitalist hear that sound it’s the sound of your freedom fluttering out the window okay I’ll stop back there so I encourage you to see the rest of this

video because it continues in the same theme so it’s a cinder for new media at Stanford if you do a search for very use tail then we’ll be able to find it I

think it’s like many of these things quite viral right now on the net so I expect it will be a very widely distributed video and and will distribute the URL to the community here

so anyway I want to get back on the talk and stream through the rest of my slides you know with as the world changes I struggle a lot is too many of my colleagues with trying to redefine what

does a library actually do because historically what we’ve done is we’ve bought books and then we’ve distributed them and so we have to sort of rethink our mission and how we engage our

community my friend and the publishing industry Mike Schadt skin it has pinned this in the context are actually have changes in publishing of what value is a repository printed content in a world

where everything is just covered in available through the computer the answer is not nearly as much as it is today as as today and not a fraction of what it was 20 years ago so when I think

about video I think about the challenges that libraries have beginning to even put their heads around what it means to work with new media this is a picture of a marvelous beautiful new library at

Berkeley where I have my office it’s their new music library and even this I find an interesting concept in a digital age what exactly is a music library in an in an era of itunes I mean obviously

their CDs that people can listen to but part of the genesis of any music libraries actually to have text about music but when you go into the music library you seem not that really many

bulks on music actually on this library has an amazing amount of underutilized space and I think it was built at a time of transition and it’s one of the first libraries I’ve seen that I think

unfortunately captures that transit in its physical space utilization because they’re not going to be able to fill the space easily with books on music and I think the way that they

anticipated nor will the space consumption be utilized by physical media so libraries have been all about physical things we’ve had the books music has been records or CDs and video

has been tape or DVDs and we’ve rented these things out to people to see at stations and then they’ve consumed them and brought them back and and then we do that again it’s a very obviously

non-digital way of distributing information so library is in essence have been offline not on the network despite the fact that we can find things in the library on the network really a

lot of the use of libraries has been offline in a really profound way the attitude of libraries has basically been we’ve got a lot of really interesting content that we’ve either purchased or

licensed to make available to our community please come and use it it’s a very passive definition of what a library is it’s assuming that users can find information that’s associated with

the library and then come to the library usually physically in order to utilize that content but as peter has said obviously the world has changed significantly and people can now build

and create their own content their own video their own audio in their own text they make their own media in a way that I think librarians just have not fully understood yet I don’t think that

there’s a sense or an understanding of the shift in production styles this is a sticky on a post outside of Berkeley make media make trouble at the indeed independent media org side from San

Francisco so you know this attitude of and this ability of making media I think really obviously is a portent of a revolute that spells trouble for libraries in an

interesting and challenging way what’s a library to do in this kind of environment where the ability to produce content has been democratized the ability to access content is assumed

also to be widely distributed and very democratized as well so one thing that libraries have done is they’ve become cafes and they serve coffee and tea and cookies and muffins I love this shot

this is actually at one of the Berkeley libraries which free speech movement cafe at Berkeley and you’ll see the video screen on the background and everybody has their laptop open with

your notes spread and you know I think also another really interesting thing about this shot is that you see people working together in a very collaborative fashion you know this is much less even

as they’ve got their laptops popped up you know head to head you know they’re talking over them this is not the solitary person reading the thick tome in the corner of the library model that

I think you know I grew up with anyway but you know these new media have challenges because they’re ephemeral music is sound video is movement neither is a stain in the way that they’ve

printed book was a thing that could be held and distributed and catalogued and circulated so the question for me is how can a library be an active participant in this engagement how does a library go

about making things from the content that it has and from the content that it can access through the contributions of its own membership its own community students faculty staff in the broader

use community that library serve because video shouldn’t obviously be passively consumed video I strongly believe can teach in a way that text never can video and live events conversation and

enlivens education in really critical and important ways that I think libraries in research universities must grapple with a fundamental ago Eve that library should deeply engage in

understanding how to utilize video resources to provide educational enrichment for students for faculty in ways that have never been explored before this is obviously a picture of a

surveillance camera a park outside of the UC Berkeley mathematics library on the bottom floors building where I work obviously this is not quite the same kind of video experience that I’m

suggesting libraries explore with their user community so video is didactic video in our new world of being able to produce content easily is an exchange it’s not just a consumption and again I

think this is an area where libraries have not really been able to understand fully the revolution that’s taken place here because there’s a conversation and libraries need to be part of that

conversation universities need to be part of that conversation with their students it’s not a one-way street we need to really understand that there’s a conversation going back and forth

between our faculty our students in the institution itself libraries I think can tell incredible stories with the resources that are available to them libraries are full of staff who have

incredible intuition about content about data description about how to utilize information and really that that expertise is going to some extent wasted and video and audio so I think a new

library is about partnering in a much deeper way than we’ve done before with scholars and information technologists and people who are engaging themselves in the creation of media to build new

ways of getting information available to our community and available for reuse so that’s a library that’s on the network in a way that we haven’t been before not offline in a sense of find the stuff and

then come to us but engage delivering distributing making content available we’re half of the way there in some ways libraries have and are preserving a tremendous amount of highly valued video

resources tremendously wonderful stuff and beginning to explore with making this content available for annotation and for consumption and reuse by faculty but we need to struggle more with

understanding how to make it available in libraries desperately need partners from the outside community to advise us on how to go about utilizing this information and making it available for

broader a consumption and that would be you I hope thank you very much

Session: Video and education new worlds
Speaker: Peter Brantley
Affiliation: Digital Library Federation
Date: May 22, 2007
Event: Video, Education, and Open Content: Best Practices