Data Compression and YouTube

              The Wikipedia article describing data compression, though tedious, was very informative regarding the ways data is compressed for our convenience. I had no idea that there audio file compression was so complicated regarding the necessity of speech encoding. When I read that speech encoding is important to enable the audio recorded to even be processed by the human ear, it made sense to me, but I had no idea how it was done or anything really.
               Lossy versus Lossless compression seemed very straightforward as well. One throws out data while the other doesn't. It seems to me that lossy compression is easier to use because it gets rid of the unnecessary data.

               The Webb article regarding YouTube is a nice read and has some good ideas that libraries and museums could do to expand their clientele.To put the collection out there and easy to use for the public is something that is essential for libraries, access. YouTube provides that easy access for libraries and even museums. The one thing that concerns me is that YouTube has since updated its policy settings and membership sign up since this article was published. It is a minor thing, but policy changes have caused many people to view YouTube as a hinderance in some cases that were not there when this article was published.

               The concept of digitization keeps coming up in our readings all over the different courses I am taking. I never really thought that YouTube would be a viable option. When I think of digitization, scanning books and photos come to mind, making videos is something that I just did not think of. It would be a great to use YouTube to digitize some things that a library has. If a library has a special collections and they put it on YouTube, just a quick "hey we have this" it would be a great way to get people into the library to see the special collection and even the collection as a whole. I hope that even with the policy changes made by Google and YouTube that projects like this are continued, either by YouTube or some other company.