The American Library University has been slowly building up its streaming video collections, as mentioned in previous posts highlighting Silent Film Online, Films on Demand, the Internet Archive, and other collections from Alexander Street Press. We’ve been slowly accumulating more streaming video resources from across the web and through new databases, and we’ve finally hit a point where we’re ready to promote the vast streaming resources in our collection!
The streaming video resource page on our website offers a search box the only looks for streaming videos in our collection. At last count, that’s a whopping 10,000+ streaming videos, including 200 high-use documentaries from Docuseek2 such as King Corn, Goodbye Mubarak!, and In the Ashes of the Forest.
Many of these films are already being used in classes. But now, students also have the option to watch them in their dorms and off-campus. Faculty can embed these videos on Blackboard as well, giving students who miss class an option to watch the videos on their own time without having to come into the library. (But we’d love to see you here anyway.)
We understand the hesitance about relying on streaming videos in class given the inherent unreliability of wireless Internet connections, but these streaming video resources are a terrific way to spice up a class’s online presence or spice up a student presentation with clips and video segments.