Is Video Now a Credible Source?
Jinfo Blog

By Deborah Andrysiak

Abstract

All videos are not created equal... and this might not be a bad thing. However, each video produced should have a clear purpose for its respective audience - whether it's to entertain, to convert prospective customers, or for information/educational purposes. As with any social media, if video is used as a resource, knowing how to distinguish the legitimacy of the video will lend credibility to your research.

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Video Overload

The latest statistics show that YouTube users upload 72 hours of video per minute. Think about it. The time it takes to type this sentence equates to five or six new uploads! That's a lot of content. And the rate of upload will undoubtedly get faster in line with the growth in the mobile device market, faster internet access via non-broadband sources such as 3G and 4G, and the proliferation of free video-editing tools.

So YouTube videos would seem to represent a rich seam of content for researchers and YouTube is oft-quoted as the second largest search engine (after Google). In breaking news an announcement this week (20 March) shows there's now another way to search YouTube content: via Google Trends, for content as far back as 2008.

However, from the research perspective, a good chunk of video uploads may not be suitable for the serious researcher as they're either those generated by the end user or those shared from another creative source. So when navigating the murky depths of video on the internet, information professionals must ask, "How you can differentiate between the more casual YouTube videos and those put out by such professional organisations as the Mayo Clinic or Microsoft, and how can you discern whether the video sources are credible and reliable?"

Purpose, Purpose, Purpose

When using video as a legitimate resource tool for information gathering purposes you need to evaluate the trustworthiness of the source. One example of linking purpose to credibility is TED-Ed.

TED-Ed is an off shoot of TED’s education initiative. With a mantra that promotes “Lessons Worth Sharing”, TED-Ed allows users to “use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed or create lessons from scratch based on any video from YouTube”. The TED-Ed video library contains “carefully curated videos, many of which represent collaborations between talented educators and animators”. TED-Ed uses manual research, viewing, reviewing, and vetting of material for its video curation. The idea that this organisation's modus operandi requires the dichotomy of repurposing a video and having it vetted by a reliable, credible source – educators – speaks volumes on the difficulty presented in qualifying a video’s reliability and accuracy.

If only it were as simple as differentiating between content that is subjective: based on opinion, or objective: based on fact. Other factors which researchers must consider include the author or sponsor of the video and the possible bias this might lend to the video's message, the source of any statistics quoted and the recency of the material or footage presented.

And of course YouTube is far from being the only aggregated source of video content on the web, the serious researcher will undoubtedly explore other avenues such as Dailymotion and Vimeo, amongst others. A search for the term "automotive engineering" on YouTube brings back 53,000 results, on Dailymotion 32,000 and on Vimeo 1,100. Broaden that out to "engineering" and YouTube presents 2.5 million results... And then there's Twitter's new offering, Vine, as explored in James Mullan's recent article "Picking Videos Fresh From the Vine", which could be ideal source for breaking news stories, for example. So knowing how to recognise a credible video must go hand-in-hand with keeping updated on the latest web outlets for video.

Stay Tuned

How can you evaluate the worth and accuracy of videos and how can you manipulate a Google search to tailor your video results to those credible sources? Learn more about how to navigate the nebulous online world of video and how to distinguish the wheat from the chaff by reading the FreePint Subscriber article entitled, "The Evolution of Video on the Web - Towards a Legitimate Resource" which focuses on how to evaluate the legitimacy and credibility of video resources and provides pragmatic tips and guidelines to help ensure accurate and reliable video sources are identified.

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