Hi Everyone, I thought the vendors out there might like to hear our (the buyers) stories about how we go looking for films. It might help them to understand what we go through and that would hopefully help them better understand the need for a centralized place to search.
So here I am, reserve services coordinator for a fairly large university. I used to put over 1000 books on reserve every year and now it's about 300. Instead of putting books on reserve I put links to full text articles, some 3000+; ebooks, small but growing as availability grows; and video, both DVD's and streams. Video is the second largest medium I put on reserve and is the fastest growing medium I put on reserve, about 1000+ per year. How do films get chosen to go on Reserve? Some faculty talk to other faculty and learn about them, others watch PBS or see a popular movie that will make the point they want to make, while others say to me, "I need a film(s) on X topic, can you suggest any?" So now I reach into my memory and might manage to retrieve one or two, I search the database of material I put on course reserve and see what other faculty are using and might come up with a few more. Beyond that, IF I have the time, I'm faced with a website to website search by vendor to see if I can find something they might be looking for. It's a cumbersome process and I tend to gravitate toward known vendors who've proven to provide quality films in the past and who have good search engines. I keep a list of those vendors in my media guide (see the Shop for Videos tab here: http://classguides.lib.uconn.edu/mediaresources ). By the time I've gone through some or all vendors on that list I'm done, no more time. So whether I've found anything or not I let the faculty member know. You might argue that there's a whole lot of filmmakers whose work is not represented here and you'd be right. The result is we both lose out on an opportunity. Think of Amazon where multiple vendors sell the same thing and make money. The benefits of having a unified database far outweigh the perception of customer loss via competition with other film vendors. I think if you continue on this same path you will be committing market suicide in the long run and you will sell less, not more, which means you message will reach fewer people. I invite other librarians to share how/why a unified search for video/streams would be useful to them. Best, Jo Ann Jo Ann Reynolds Reserve Services Coordinator University of Connecticut Libraries 369 Fairfield Road, Unit 1005RR Storrs, CT 06269-1005 jo_ann.reyno...@lib.uconn.edu 860-486-1406 860-486-5636 (fax) http://classguides.lib.uconn.edu/mediaresources
VIDEOLIB is intended to encourage the broad and lively discussion of issues relating to the selection, evaluation, acquisition,bibliographic control, preservation, and use of current and evolving video formats in libraries and related institutions. It is hoped that the list will serve as an effective working tool for video librarians, as well as a channel of communication between libraries,educational institutions, and video producers and distributors.
