Duke shows off YouTube channel

DURHAM -- Duke University has a new Internet presence designed to reach prospective students where they love to hang out: YouTube.

The university unveiled its YouTube channel Wednesday, essentially a Web site hosted by the online video giant where Duke hopes to dazzle alumni and future Dukies with all manner of video and related information.

The Google-owned YouTube dominates the Internet video market and is popular with young people who use it to view and upload professional and amateur video. But a growing number of universities -- UNC-Chapel Hill has a YouTube channel too -- are using YouTube's extraordinary reach to trumpet academic discovery.

"Some universities may just say 'we don't want to be in a place that's just a lot of funny animal videos,' " said David Jarmul, Duke's associate vice president of news and communications. "But we know that a lot of people are going there, and we think it's important to be there."

Duke already has a significant presence on YouTube, with videos of everything from lab research to basketball team mascot tryouts. But a designated "channel" gives Duke a slick-looking presence it can control. It costs little, Jarmul said, because much of the content is already in use on Duke's own Web sites.

It makes sense to replicate material, said Paul Jones, a UNC journalism professor who specializes in Internet communications.

"It need not be in one place," Jones said. "The more access, the better."

One potential hang-up: The location of the university-specific channels isn't immediately evident on the YouTube.com home page, and searches for "Duke University" and "UNC Chapel Hill" turn up plenty of videos but no link to the university sites.

Duke began uploading university-related videos to YouTube in the fall of 2006 and has drawn hundreds of thousands of hits.

Still, YouTube is largely a venue for the zany.

Consider: The UNC-Chapel Hill-related video that has by far received the most hits is the "Pit Breakup," a staged campus breakup between boyfriend and girlfriend that has been viewed on YouTube more than 429,000 times. But on UNC-CH's channel, you can also view remarks by Chancellor-elect Holden Thorp, a lecture by a social work professor and an interview with a professor of information and library science.

The broad swath of materials, from the quirky to the mundane, should be an attraction, Jones said.

"The reason you go to YouTube is because they'll have some '60s band, some skateboard guy and some guy lecturing at Berkeley," he said. "It's OK to be obscure."