Making Use of YouTube

I love YouTube, the site where virtually anyone can post videos of virtually anything, as much as the next person, but I never thought I’d be using it for learning or for work.  To me, it wasn’t much more than a place to watch really fun stuff people sent me in e-mail forwards, like this or this.  Slowly but surely, I’ve been reconsidering my stance on YouTube.  There’s actually a ton of useful material if you’re willing to dig a little bit to find it.

For example, a few months ago I found a portion of one of my all-time favorite works, The Way Things Go by Fischli and Weiss:

A few weeks ago, The Observer published a list of the “Top 50 Arts Videos on YouTube,” which covers art, literature, and music, and includes things like this interview with Francis Bacon:

YouTube just keeps proving itself more useful.  Earlier in the quarter Sarah showed me some great clips of early 90s all-girl punk bands she was using for her class.  Over the summer, I managed to find a video  Dan mentioned, Claude Lelouch’s 1976 C’était un Rendezvous (admittedly of rather poor quality, but available nonetheless).

My visual resources colleagues at the Architecture school at UT-Austin have found yet another use for YouTube.  They’ve produced several videos to market their services and offer users tips on things like creating PowerPoint presentations.

Videos from YouTube, Google Video, and other sites can be incorporated into your DUVAGA presentations by simply copying the “embed code” (shown below) from the video webpage into DUVAGA.  As long as the video remains on YouTube or Google Video, it will remain in  your gallery.

More New Images – Art:21 and 20th Century Design

We just uploaded 557 more purchased images to DUVAGA yesterday, and I think this set helps us fill a gap in modern and contemporary art and design!  The new images, licensed through Davis Art Images, include sets from the PBS series Art:21, as well as some great images of 20th century design.  A couple of my favorites from this set include:

Images of Krzysztof Wodiczko projections…

…a few from Cai Guo Qiang…

…and some great examples of modern design, like this Eero Aarnio chair

As always, I’ve created a gallery (“Davis Art Images, 9/8/08 Upload”) of these recently uploaded images, which faculty can now find at the top of the “instructor galleries” page.  Students can find these images through the Art History search page — all of them have been cataloged with “Visual Media Director” as the instructor.

Again, please let me know about any metadata discrepencies, or if you have trouble finding anything!  Enjoy!

The Commons on Flickr

In July I wrote about the Boston Public Library’s Flickr Collection. This is part of a new trend in image sharing, exemplified by the Flickr Commons. Begun in January as a partnership between Flickr and the Library of Congress, The Commons now includes images from the photo archives of several different institutions, including:

The Library of Congress (collections include News in the 1910s and the 30s and 40s in Color),

The Smithsonian Institution (collections include Portraits of Artists and American Celebrations),

Bibliotheque de Toulouse (including collections of Personages and Portraits, as well as Architecture, Monuments, and Archeology),

The Brooklyn Museum (collections include several on Egypt, as well as an interesting bookplate collection),

The Powerhouse Museum (images of Sydney, rural life in Australia, and Australian flora and fauna),

George Eastman House (includes a collection of autochromes, a set of carte de visites and cabinet cards, among others),

and, added just this week, Britain’s National Media Museum, which has some really great historic photographs.

Keep an eye out for more collections — they’re being added all the time. These are wonderful tools for research, and the images are high-quality and tend to be pretty well documented. Part of the idea behind doing this is that users will help these institutions “fill in the blanks,” adding their own knowledge to an image record with tags and comments. For example, users have suggested that this image, thought by the Library of Congress to be near Creede, Colorado, was actually taken elsewhere. They’ve tagged the image with relevant keywords, and they’ve even tagged specific objects within the image, like the cirrus clouds.

Participating institutions are required to upload images only with no known copyright restrictions, which means the images can be used by anyone for any purpose, which, of course, includes using them in DUVAGA!