The Division of Biological Science, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, is integrating macrobiology (dealing with organisms at an individual or higher level, mainly through fieldwork—a tradition of Kyoto University) and microbiology (dealing with organisms at cellular or lower levels to reveal the structures and functions of cells, gene expression, development, neurotransmission, and molecular structures of protein, etc., through laboratory work). The university is also promoting education and studies of a variety of life phenomena woven by diverse organisms on our planet. An enormous amount of videos and images taken from field and laboratory work inside and outside Japan have been acquired so far, but many of them were inaccessible, hidden in a personal laboratory.

At the expense of the 2017 presidential discretionary project entitled, “Building up Videos and Images Archives of Biology,” Kyoto University’s Division of Biological Science has systematically sorted the videos and images, managed them centrally, and built up an open archive in order to improve accessibility as study materials for the researchers and enable the general public to browse and use them as teaching materials through the internet. Almost all the laboratories belonging to the Departments of Zoology, Botany, and Biophysics located on the Yoshida Campus (the main campus of Kyoto University) joined forces to contribute to the archives. 

We named this open archive KyU Tube Bio in the hopes that it will become a familiar site like YouTube because it is a sharable site containing videos relating to organisms (“Bio”) created by Kyoto University. We tried to add simple explanations for the videos and images. On the other hand, we made efforts to enrich metadata such as keywords, location, date of creation, and video settings as well as the scientific name of the organism in order to secure the documentary values as a site managed by the university. Users can search videos and images with these metadata.

We hope KyU Tube Bio will be useful in providing study materials and teaching materials to all the researchers, students, pupils, and teachers inside and outside Japan.