Jo Ann Reynolds wrote: 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. Amen to what Jo Ann has outlined here. I had her precise scenario arise in my workflow today: prof walks in, tells me she will be doing a freshman tutorial on "Food" and wonders what we might have that could be helpful to her. Because I know our collection well, I steer her to 10-12 films, including King Corn, The Future of Food, The World According to Monsanto, The End of the Line, Farmageddon, In Organic We Trust, Fresh, Food Stamped, What's On Your Plate?, etc. However, as I realize we're probably lacking a bit on GMOs, I start looking around for docs on that topic. It really, truly, is what Jo Ann describes: "a website to website search by vendor"; which *is* cumbersome and *is* imperfect. Bullfrog, Video Project, NFB, Films for the Humanities, etc. are known to me, and I head there... but I also wonder what I'm missing. Perhaps one would be inclined to argue that the same is true with books. However, I would argue back that - at least in academe - we have Choice, which provides subject-specific scholarly peer reviews of new works by subject. This makes it much, much easier to find up-to-date offerings in a particular area, with a peer review attached. I *love* Video Librarian - particularly as something to pick up and scan through from cover to cover - but it reviews such a wide range of material that it simply doesn't cover enough. Does that make sense? Probably not, but as an example, I just searched "GMO" and got 0 matches; searched "Monsanto" and turned up 8 matches (2 of which were actually pretty much "false positives"). I know that there have been many more documentaries made on this topic than 6. Resorting to Google searches is an option, but it certainly makes it harder to ascertain the "scholarly review status" of what's out there - at least without a fair bit of (time-consuming) additional searching. This is a long way of saying that I agree with Jo Ann. As one who does acquisitions for both films and books, I can assure you that the film world is MUCH more labor-intensive and much more frustrating. This is one reason I love attending National Media Market, as it makes discovery so much easier, and it provides an opportunity to get to know what particular vendors are particularly good at, so that when one of these faculty requests comes up, I have a bit of a sense where to begin my website to website search. Attendance at NMM is a help; the preview portal is a help. Still, I'd love to see a more complete mechanism for unified search. Susan Albrecht
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.
