UF’s Digital Library Center is still working on making video files work properly through our Digital Collections. In the meantime, we’re adding videos to Youtube so that people can access the videos since some of them are really neat.
Thus far, we’ve loaded the Preservation Book Care video in two parts because of Youtube’s file size and length limitations: part 1 and part 2.
I also separated out a very short clip of a roach eating a book part because it’s great. The clip is super-zoomed in on the roach and it just looks wonderfully sci-fi. The Library Preservation Officer has an entomology video connection and so we’ll hopefully have more wonderful videos like this soon.
2007-11-13
If you want to provide videos in Flash format, you should really consider blip.tv. It’s got integrated Creative Commons licensing and it shares advertising revenue with creators.
Whether you use blip.tv or YouTube, you should create a Miro channel with your video RSS (why.
A nice addition to both distribution and preservation is to upload everything to the Internet Archive. It’s another (open) distribution channel — unlike Flash-based players, at full resolution, in open formats — and Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. It also has integrated CC licensing.
Since Flash is proprietary, we’re not interested in it for cost/sustainability/access issues, but Youtube gets lots of hits and it’s a fun and easy way for mass-distribution until our AV server is fully functional. We do load our other files to Internet Archive and we will be loading our video files once we have a fully functioning process for them (and hopefully that’ll be soon!). For other Flash-like applications, we plan to develop with OpenLaszlo since it writes to DHTML and Flash simultaneously so we can go through a single creation process for the most usable now and the most sustainable open, standards based solution for the longterm.
Once we have more videos, we’ll definitely be using RSS feeds, blogs llike this, and other means to get the videos out and to grow interest in the videos and the Digital Collections overall. I’ll see my bug-video contact tomorrow, but I don’t think I’ll get more of those or more library videos until next week or the week after. As soon as I have them, I’ll share them (especially the bugs)!