On Wednesday, Duke University will join the web casting world by launching a channel on You Tube. Officials at Duke say the new channel will help reach prospective students, and open the door for the university to reach other audiences online. Duke plans to produce video from classrooms, labs, and around campus. The channel comes just days after a You Tube official gave a talk about strategic partnership with universities.

"Several hundred thousand people have watched videos from Duke since we began placing them on YouTube in October 2006," said David Jarmul, Duke's associate vice president of news and communications. "This new channel will help us reach even more people and pull together Duke's videos more effectively for students, alumni and others interested in the university or just looking for good material."

Duke is only one of many universities using You Tube to provide such material. A You Tube search turns up content from the University of California, Berkley, Auburn University, Vanderbilt University, and even Duke University's Improv team.

Tracy Futhey, Duke's vice president for information technology and chief information officer says the YouTube channel comes as an expansion to Duke's existing web initatives using iPods and iTunes U.

"Our faculty and students are becoming more and more proficient and sophisticated video-content producers, and we want these valuable materials to reach their widest audience possible," she said. "The new Duke YouTube channel provides an important distribution mechanism for Duke-related content."

The channel can be found at www.youtube.com/duke.