I know there are hospital librarians out there whose IT departments prevent them from downloading videos. However, librarians all know there are some good online medical/health videos out there that our users want to watch. I just read on Blogadillo that a survey by Jupiter Research that forty six percent of online users are interested in watching health videos online. Of those online users 52% already go online for health reasons. Most of the respondents find the videos through search engines (62%) while 47% go to a health web site and 11% go their health insurer's web site.

People learn and retain things in different ways. Many people find writing information down as a helpful method of retaining knowledge while others find observation (watching health videos) as helpful. Systematically preventing hospital employees and patients from downloading medical and health videos is hurting the education interests of a large group of online users. I have heard some librarians say that IT rationale for blocking videos is limited bandwidth. None of us want the hospital's internet to slow down to a glacial creep, but perhaps there could a better solution rather than blocking all videos. One idea is to allow the library computers to watch videos.

Perhaps hospital librarians out there can use some of the statistics to help bolster their case to IT to allow video downloading. If you have had success with this, please comment and share your knowledge so that we all can benefit from your experience.