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Video Playlists

Does your library create videos for patrons to watch?  If so, and if you have more than, say, 25 or 30, you should organize them into playlists.  YouTube has a playlist feature that makes organizing your library videos easy.  Plus, YouTube is a free service.
 

 
Our YouTube channel playlists are divided into several categories, including:
  • Type of library video (e.g., promo trailers, local history videos, readalouds, singalongs, book trailers, etc.);
  • Genre of book (f0r book trailers) (e.g., biography, historical fiction, children's picture books, children's chapter books, humor, etc.); and
  • Most recent videos.
Patrons may then browse playlists for particular subject areas or video types.  For instance, suppose a patron is looking for books about horror or supernatural fiction.  We've got a book trailer playlist for that.



 Horror & Supernatural Fiction
(MPL Book Trailer Playlist)
Do you like romance novels?



 Romance Fiction
(MPL Book Trailer Playlist)
How about adventure and science fiction?



 Adventure & Science Fiction
(MPL Book Trailer Playlist)
Is your preschooler or early elementary student looking for read-along videos for picture books available to checkout at your library?

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5bkxeYN4gOd-ykpDx10_T70tYb5LkBL

Story Time LIVE (This Week) Playlist
by Clinton (Indiana) Public Library




 MPL Readaloud
(MPL Children's Video Playlist)
YouTube does have a comprehensive list of each channel's videos, but when you have as many as we do (currently 770), that's a lot of screens to scroll.  Playlists help direct patrons to videos of interest, and they also promote other types of videos that viewers may not have known about.  While looking for one playlist, patrons may become interested in another.  In this way, your playlists cross-pollinate interest in your entire video collection.

Vimeo does not appear to offer playlist capability for its free channels.

If you upload videos directly to Facebook, you may organize them in a video library, which can be searched and filtered to find particular videos.

At my library, we paste video URLs hosted on our YouTube channel into our social media, rather than directly upload videos to Facebook Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc. (although we have uploaded some video clips from our outdoor LED sign to Facebook and Twitter).

Our patrons seem to find our playlists reasonably easy to navigate.  We've offered programs showing patrons our YouTube channel and asked them to rate its ease-of-use.  It's not a large survey, but those who participated in the programs liked what they saw.

There's another advantage to high volume:  The more YouTube videos you have, the more likely they will appear higher in search results.  So playlists are essential to keep them all organized.

 Of course, if your viewers are finding your library videos using search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., then they won't use playlists.  But patrons browsing your YouTube channel (or other video hosting site) would probably benefit from playlist organization.  It's all about making it easier for your patrons to watch.

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