INTERVIEW
Helping librarians access high quality health content on YouTube
Dr Vishaal Virani, Head of Health at YouTube, UK & Ireland talks to Rob Mackinlay about health content on YouTube, and the role that librarians can play in navigating individuals towards it, ahead of the CILIP Confer- ence on 10 and 11 July. Book your place now at
www.cilipconference.org.uk.
WITH more than three billion views of YouTube health videos in the UK in 2022, the platform has carved itself a role in the nation’s health information landscape and is increasingly focused on maintaining and building public confi- dence in its health content. Speaking to Information Professional ahead of CILIP Conference 2024, where he will take part in the ‘Supporting Health and Digital Literacy’ session, Vishaal said: “Libraries and librarians are an important potential audience because of the role they play in directing people to relevant and credible information, and how accessible they are to the public in their local communities, just like YouTube. People might also want to access YouTube through a library because they don’t have access to the internet at home, or they don’t know how to navigate to the right information online. So, it would be useful to empower librarians with the knowl- edge of what sort of health content is available on YouTube and how to navigate it.”
Health shelf Vishaal said: “The YouTube health initiative kicked off a few years ago to make it easier for viewers to access authoritative health informa- tion on YouTube. The way the YouTube Health features work is that if you search for any health topic on the platform, you’ll see a shelf labelled ‘from health sources’ near the top of the search results which specifically contains videos com- ing from authoritative sources – that’s how we try and make it clear to the viewers which are credible sources on the platform.”
As well as this drive for greater authority, the 22 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob MacKinlay (
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is a journalist at Information Professional
accessibility and inclusiveness of the content is also an area of interest. Vishaal said: “I work very closely with a range of different partners in the UK who create health content – NHS organisations, health charities and individual clinicians – to make that content as engaging as possible.”
Quality content
Vishaal points out that content still needs to be relevant and engaging, saying: “This includes hitting the topic areas that our viewers are searching for. We definitely spend a lot of time identifying where the relative gaps are in our content across health topics. But they are being plugged very quickly as we get more organisations and individuals from the health ecosystem creating content.”
He adds: “The NHS website could probably claim to cover every single condition but where YouTube content is valuable, is in covering topics in a way that is accessible, digestible and easy to understand for individuals.
June 2024
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