Sometimes student research involves watching audio-visual materials to prepare for an in-class or seminar presentation. Since they may have been asked to limit the research materials that they quote to scholarly items, students may ask the library staff:

Is there any way to know if a video is scholarly?

We may answer them:

Who created the video?

If the names of the filmmakers are on the video, we should be able to see if they are recognized authorities in their subjects. We may add:

Have they published books or scholarly articles on the same subject?

There are other ways to see if the creators of videos are considered reliable experts in a field of study. Googling their names, we should be able to see if they are associated with any university. Another question we might ask the student:

Who produced the video? 

Sometimes this information is given on websites that host videos, such as YouTube, but in other cases this useful data may be missing. Who published a video tells us who wants to spread the information it contains. If they are objective and scholarly, then the information is more likely to be accurate. If we Google the name of the video’s publisher and we do not recognize it, click on the About Us link that is given on most organization websites, and read the description of what the purpose of the organization is. For example, if the student is researching for a presentation on whether durian is tasty or smells bad, clearly there are different opinions on this issue. If a video was made by the Malaysia Durian Exporters Association, this is a commercial group whose purpose is to sell durian internationally. They may not be the best place to look for points of view from consumers who do not like the smell of durian. If the video was produced by the Thai Durian Institute, we would see that this is a communication channel for Thai durian farmers, the government, and others. Or the Thai Fresh Fruit Traders and Exporters Association, another marketing group. Thailand’s Department of Internal Trade (DIT) under the Ministry of Commerce creates market opportunities and maintains stable agricultural commodity prices. Durian is one of the leading agricultural products under its supervision, so if the DIT produces a video, we may assume that these are serious statistics from an authoritative source. Since many students spend a lot of time on social media, they may ask us if videos they find there are scholarly. Our reply:

Social media is not a good source for scholarly videos or any other materials. Social media is a place for personal statements without fact-checking or objectivity.

Students should be encouraged to look elsewhere than in individual websites or blogs, where too many misleading statements are made. The student may ask:

If I should not look on social media for scholarly videos, where should I look?

There are many examples of multimedia open access research. One example is the Open Yale Courses website. In the videos offered, ajarns give lectures on different subjects, much as they offer to students who are enrolled at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. It is easy to look up the names of the ajarns and see that they are eminent experts in their fields. If they make a statement in a classroom lecture that is filmed, it may be considered scholarly. MIT Open Courseware is another source of academic lectures. Many of these sites include subtitles and transcripts, so students should not worry if they do not understand everything that is said in the lecture. If it seems to be of interest, they can go back and listen to it again, or just check the transcript. The transcript also makes it easier to quote directly from the lecture, if this is useful for the student’s presentation. Sometimes worthwhile material turns up in unexpected places. For example, we know that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a famous place for studying the sciences and related subjects, but it also has a fine literature faculty, so its open course lecture website has some material on literature as well. The University of California at Irvine also has some open courses posted on its website. If the video is from a source that is not a university, some lectures may be more serious than others. The popular TED Talks website has many different speakers and subjects. It is best to Google the names of the speakers to see if they are ajarns or not. That way we will know whether or not they have published research in the field they are speaking about. The Library of Congress in Washington, DC also features a series of webcasts by authorities in their field. Since this material is presented by the national library of the United States of America, it may be taken as serious and scholarly. Even the greatest experts sometimes make mistakes, but at least they will have made real efforts to verify the information they present. Oxford University has a series of podcasts online, as do other distinguished academic institutions.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)