Interesting Web 2.0 video

First post to the blog, so let's play with embedding some video:



I got linked to the above video by my husband, who's a high school teacher. And let me just say I'm thrilled that there's a place like teachertube out there to archive educational content.

The one comment I really wanted to address from this video is when it mentions the billions of searches posted to google and wonders to whom these questions were addressed before google. The short answer? Librarians, of course.

In the "olden days" when you needed to know things like, oh, who won the world series in 1969, or statistics on current labor trends, there wasn't a quick google search to unearth that information. You needed someone with specialized knowledge to point you to where you could find that information (Sports Almanac for the first, and perhaps a specialized government document for the second.)

Now most people can get the information they want pretty quickly. However, there's a big difference in the quality of information. Sure, they may end up on the Bureau of Labor statistics homepage if they do the search right. But the average person isn't going to notice things like that right away, or why information on a certain page is more legit than others. That is the new role for Librarians in the web 2.0 era.