Author Q&A: BU Libraries Michael Fernandez on Streaming Video Collection Development and Management
Michael Fernandez, Head of Technical Services for the BU Libraries, oversees the work to ensure library resources are discoverable and accessible to the BU community. He has co-authored a new book that offers library professionals practical advice on selecting, acquiring, and managing streaming media. Streaming Video Collection Development and Management, co-authored by Yale University Library’s Amauri Serrano, outlines the rapidly evolving and complex landscape libraries are currently navigating and provides guidance for library professionals at every size and type of institution.
Streaming Video Collection Development and Management, published by Bloomsbury Libraries Unlimited, is now available through the BU Libraries.
Michael, who previously held e-resource positions at Yale University and American University, recently shared more about the book, ongoing issues in streaming media management, and his approach to creating a resource for all library workers.
Q: What did your work, and the landscape of streaming media in libraries, look like when you began thinking about this book?
A: In 2019, Yale was acquiring more and more streaming media, and there were challenges responding to this format and the growing demand for it—faculty were increasingly asking for it to show in classes and students were asking for it to complete assignments. This was leading up to 2020, when the need for streaming video exponentially grew due to the pandemic, and we needed to ramp up our efforts to acquire more.
Working with the collection development librarian at Yale, my co-author Amauri Serrano, we found we were having to develop new workflows for sourcing streaming videos and doing outreach to distributors. In many cases, the streaming videos we were acquiring were niche documentaries where we’d have to directly contact the filmmaker: how do we do that? On the e-resources management side: how do we make content discoverable and accessible to users? That was a challenge.
Q: How did building workflows for managing streaming media evolve into a guide for libraries?
A: This wasn’t really written down anywhere and the actual monographs that were out on streaming management and libraries were 5 to 10 years old. Obviously, a lot of changes had taken place in the marketplace and there are a lot of differences in what workflows look like today.
We had the basics. How do we scale this up? We felt that a lot of libraries were going through these same challenges, so our idea was to outline what we found to be best practices and to reach as wide an audience as possible. A lot of the fundamentals are the same, regardless of size, mission, or budget of your library. We wanted to put them into a manual that would be helpful across libraries. We saw that as supporting our mission: speak to librarians at all types of institutions and address their specific work.
Q: How did you approach this manual to address such a wide range of topics and users?
A: This book is for any librarian or library worker in any situation. Even though there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, the fundamental tools and techniques that we outline in the book can be applied by library staff to their library and help them manage streaming video, regardless of what capacity they are working in.
Each chapter includes interview sections with librarians who work with streaming at different types of libraries–public, community college, other small and mid-size universities, large consortia. One thing we found, regardless of size or financial situation, we were still fundamentally dealing with the same issues. All of their stories echoed what we were seeing in our day to-day work at Yale.
It’s a guide with real-world perspectives.
Q: What does the future of streaming media management look like?
A: The way the marketplace is going for streaming video now, it seems to be moving away from ownership models and more toward subscription-based models, which is similar to what we are seeing with other content, such as e-books. Going forward, I’d like to see what other options we have for the local hosting of files and to look into applying principles from the book into practical licensing workflows.
Michael Fernandez is the Head of Technical Services for the BU Libraries, overseeing a department tasked with managing electronic resources as well as cataloging and processing physical collections.