While looking at the Library of Congress presence on YouTube the other day, I was curious about other national library presences. A very quick search for national library ‘channels’ revealed the following …
- The European Library
- The National Library Board of Singapore
- The National Library of Wales
- The National library of NZ
- The National Library of Scotland
- The Library of Congress
Mostly, they are exploratory steps. I have mentioned the National Library of Scotland presence before and quoted an interesting discussion by Eilidh MacGlone about the initiative:
In conclusion, there really is no place like home to us at the moment – our catalogue is in much better shape than YouTube’s. But we think YouTube is a great place to take our filmshows, to visit and meet our users, to build relationships and to interact with them, and perhaps in this aspect, YouTube is better than any online service we yet offer. [WIDWISAWN: volume 6, issue 1, page 4]
The Library of Congress has an interesting selection of videos and I wonder what their target volume is. I was also interested in how the library characterised itself: “As the world’s preeminent reservoir of knowledge, we are the steward of millions of recordings dating from the earliest Edison films to the present” (emphasis mine). And indeed the most popular video is titled “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, Jan. 7, 1894”.
