My concern is that people are pointing to it was real evidence of something. I also think that the same points could have been made in another way that was not fabricated and have had the same effect.

I did use the video in a presentation on Tuesday, to a group of mostly older special collections librarians and older museum/archive/local history volunteers. The topic was using the social web to promote and provide access to special collections. Most of these organizations are still working with static HTML-based websites, and are in no way poised to make their content accessible in a Web 2.0, much less 3.0, environment. My job was to help them understand why migrating to dynamically-driven web-based content is so critical, and why it will become even more critical in order to stay relevant to younger patrons.

I started off the discussion by pointing out that this video was obviously fabricated, that it simply, creatively, and humorously raises ideas these organizations need to become aware of if they want their collections to become more accessible to younger generations of researchers.

And the illustration worked. We devoted quite a bit of Q&A time afterward, discussing terms and ideas raised by the video (most of these concepts were quite foreign to my audience). It was my job to answer these questions and provide more credible data as “proof”. This video simply got my audience thinking.