14 British Universities Film & Video Council http://bufvc.ac.uk

Kevin Wilson, Subject

Librarian for the Institute for

Management Studies and

Audiovisual Librarian at

Goldsmiths College, asks,

what does video streaming

mean for the higher

education library?

here is growing acceptance that theuse of video in learning and teaching has clear educational

value and can engage and motivatestudents, while allowing them todevelop important cognitive skills. Videouse is already prevalent in highereducation. Greg Benfield et al’s 2009article ‘Student Learning TechnologyUse: Preferences for Study and Contact’,investigated students’ e-learningactivities and discovered that ‘high usageactivities involve multimedia use,particularly listening to audio andwatching video’, while Jack Holland in‘Video Use and the Student LearningExperience in Politics and InternationalRelations’ (2014) studied video use andthe student learning experience inPolitics and International Relations,noting that ‘digital native’ students arealready fluent in using thesetechnologies, and academic staffthemselves expect to make greater useof video in class.

While it is clear that using videoenriches the student learningexperience, it also allows students todevelop visual literacy skills. Visualliteracy is a term first coined by JohnDebes in 1969, which he defined as ‘agroup of vision-competencies a humanbeing can develop by seeing and at thesame time having and integrating othersensory experiences’. In 2001, theAssociation of College and ResearchLibraries defined visual literacy standardsin higher education. The ACRL believethat a visually literate individual shouldbe able to determine which materialshe/she needs and how to find, access,interpret, analyse and use them botheffectively and ethically. The Society ofCollege, National and University Libraries

(SCONUL) includes visual literacy withinthe umbrella term of information literacy.SCONUL believes an information literateindividual should demonstrate ‘anawareness of how they gather, use,manage, synthesise and createinformation and data in an ethicalmanner and will have the informationskills to do so effectively.’

Changes in technology have madevideo increasingly available andaccessible. Streaming services such asBBC iPlayer, Netflix and Amazon PrimeInstant have changed how audiencesconsume television programming.Ofcom’s 2015 Communications MarketReport revealed that six in ten adults use‘video on demand’ services - 4.4 millionhouseholds subscribe to Netflix, while1.2 million households subscribe toAmazon Prime Instant. It also found that16-24 year olds use computers andsmartphones to access on-demandservices more frequently than using set-top boxes and they watch short-form

video (e.g. YouTube) more often than anyother age group. Students are alreadystreaming for recreational purposes, sousing it for educational purposes seemsperfectly logical.

As iPlayer and Netflix are changinghow video is consumed, providers ofeducational video have followed suit.Many readers will be familiar with Box ofBroadcasts (BoB) (http://bobnational.net), a shared online off-air TV and radiorecording service available tosubscribing institutions. Box ofBroadcasts has over 2 millionprogrammes in its archive, which arekept indefinitely. For higher and furthereducation libraries, services such as BoBhave been liberating. In the past,librarians would manually record

Streaming VisualLiteracy

T

March 2016 No 102

… Ofcom's 2015 Communications Market Report revealedthat six in ten adults use video on demand services

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15British Universities Film & Video Council http://bufvc.ac.uk

programmes, create catalogue records,print labels and find sufficient shelfspace for multiple copies of videos andDVDs. Now, users can log-in, set aprogramme to record within seconds (orfind one recorded by another institution)and view it once it has been broadcast.Users can stream programmes, whereverthey are in the UK, no matter whichdevice they are using.

Alexander Street Press(http://alexanderstreet.com) seeks totransform how we research, learn andteach in various disciplines by providingaccess to a number of video collections,ranging from Art and Architecture toWorld Newsreels from the twentiethcentury. Artfilms (www.artfilms.co.uk)offers more than 5,000 films in variousart forms from all over the world, whileConcord Media (www.concordmedia.org.uk), a non-profit provider of films ontopics of social concern allows films tobe purchased or rented on-demand viaVimeo. In many cases, these films areonly available from these suppliers andonly for streaming.

Although students are confident andcapable of streaming video, there is still arole for the librarian. When libraries takeout subscriptions to video collections forstreaming, making these resourcesdiscoverable and usable is vital. Ifstudents know we subscribe to a specificfilm for streaming, they can search thelibrary catalogue or the supplier’splatform, but it is more likely that astudent will find a documentary filmmore serendipitously, when they aresearching the library catalogue on atopic that interests them. With the rise ofdiscovery and delivery tools such asPrimo and Summon, which provideaccess to all the collections that a librarysubscribes to in a single search, studentscan search for a topic and immediatelyrestrict their searches, making thestreming process simpler.

Regarding usability, a resource likeBoB is intuitive, has straightforwardsearching and playback features, as wellas a high degree of functionality,allowing users to create clips andplaylists. Many other streaming serviceshave similar features. When Goldsmithsfirst subscribed to BoB, I invitedacademic staff from our Media andCommunications department fortraining, demonstrating and explaining

the different features and highlightinghow programmes can be embedded intoVLEs or shared by URL.

I have successfully run sessionsteaching students how to useaudiovisual resources in their learningand research. Last year, I used specificexamples of how students might usevideo to supplement text-basedresearch. Using the example of the Fall ofthe Berlin Wall, I showed how Jisc MediaHub (http://jiscmediahub.ac.uk) canretrieve primary news footage ofhistorical events. Since these resourcesare not available through library dis -covery tools, students might notinitially know where to find suchfootage.

There are an increasing number ofvideo archives making their filmsavailable. The role of the librarian isincreasingly curatorial, selecting andevaluating content relevant for ouraudience. Goldsmiths is particularlystrong in the fields of art, design andvisual cultures, so a resource like Arts onFilm Archive (http://artsonfilm-beta.wmin.ac.uk) is a stunning treasuretrove. Developed by the Arts andHumanities Research Council and theUniversity of Westminster, it providesaccess to approximately 450 films on artproduced in the UK since the 1950s,combining rare material about individualartists or definitive coverage on specificart-related subjects. BFI Player(http://player.bfi.org.uk/), however, is acurious hybrid. Primarily, it looks like anart-house equivalent to Netflix, withrecent independent and world cinema

films for rental. However, dig a little deeper and there are numerous fascinating documentaries that revealthe history of twentieth-century Britain.During our celebration of Black HistoryMonth in October 2015, I compiled a listof ten documentaries made between1950s-1980s that depicted the Black andAsian experience in post-war Britain andhighlighted an important era for racerelations and immigration. The BFI hasalso developed its Britain on Film feature,delivered through BFI Player, whichallows a viewer to search for any locationin the UK to discover what is in the BFINational Archive.

Video streaming has been one of themost exciting technological advances ofrecent years, and which our users areexperienced in browsing throughprogrammes on iPlayer or findingshorter content on YouTube, there is stilla role for librarians in acquiring relevantresources, promoting and raisingawareness of them, and ensuring thatthey are discoverable and usable. Thechallenge for librarians now is to keepabreast of the increasing number ofarchives that are digitising video andmaking them available. Visual and text-based resources are not in competition;they complement each other perfectly.Video can breathe life into subjects,giving new perspectives and first-handaccounts, and it has the potential toreinvigorate the role of the librarian whocan act as gatekeepers for this wealth ofnew information.

Kevin Wilson

March 2016 No 102

THE UNSEEN MARCH – QUESTIONING THE MILITARISATION OF SCHOOLS is just one of hundreds of films availableto stream from Concord Media (2015 © Concord Media).

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