UCTV
UC researchers can easily record and submit presentations, share with fellow scholars.

UCTVSeminars, is a new service that provides researchers with a simple, low-cost way to record and share their work with colleagues around the system through the website and its related YouTube and iTunes channels.

With hundreds of seminars, conferences and colloquia taking place each week across the University of California system, it’s nearly impossible for today’s scholar to keep up. While many scholarly presentations are posted online after the fact, they often end up buried in departmental or conference websites, making it difficult for anyone unaware of the event to discover on their own.

UCTVSeminars is a new scholar-serving web portal launched in May by University of California Television (UCTV), offers a simple, cost-effective solution by providing a single destination for scholars to find and share peer-to-peer scholarly presentations in any academic discipline via video and visual media. Using UCTV’s existing online dissemination infrastructure and experience organizing large video collections for prime search engine optimization, UCTVSeminars offers an easy-to-navigate user interface that allows visitors to browse videos by subject area, event date, speaker name, conference, host organization or UC campus. While presentations must originate from a University of California campus or affiliated institution, they feature researchers from universities around the world and can be freely viewed in Flash format, downloaded as audio and/or video podcasts, and embedded in outside websites.

Presentations are also made available on UCTVSeminars’ YouTube channel and on UCTV’s iTunesU channel. UC researchers are invited to submit their own video presentations to the UCTVSeminars site through the online video uploader. Formats can range from a simple narrated PowerPoint presentation to a highly-produced video. Programs will appear alongside user-submitted metadata, including descriptions, related links, lecture notes, and other complementary materials.

Take a look at the content already uploaded to UCTVSeminars and see how you might use it, too.

(Full disclosure: UCTV, the solid foundation upon which UCTVSeminars is being built, is a partner with the Graduate Division in presenting the Graduate Council Lectures and similar events — some going back decades — beyond the in-person attendees in the hall to a worldwide audience via video and podcast.)