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Large interest in the National Library of Sweden’s YouTube-channel

By Christopher Natzén

During the autumn of 2009, The National Library of Sweden (KB) launched its own YouTube-channel. Upon its release, the channel contained 34 items selected from the Audio Visual Department’s web exhibition and lecture series “News!” (available until 26 April 2010). The exhibition contains news clips from the National Library’s large collection of audiovisual material, and its aim is to show how the news service has changed in Sweden during the 20th-Century. This rather arbitrary selection of Swedish news reports covers 100 years that has in common their “news worthiness” at the time: from the boat Göta Elf’s capsize on 15 April 1908 in Gothenburg when 26 people died to a clash between neo-nazis and common people in Växjö on 13 April 1985 and the crash of the Swedish fighter plane JAS 39 Gripen during a flight exhibition in central Stockholm on 8 August 1993. All items are contextualised with extensive metadata and tags but otherwise no publicity campaign was made except on the major web page of the National Library. Despite this KB had over 112 000 views during the first three months on the YouTube-channel, and it seems that most viewers found their way there through Google, which shows that the interest of the audiovisual cultural heritage is large.

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