It’s 86 degrees in Washington right now. Wasn’t it just snowing a few weeks ago? As the semester rolls to a close and summer is bounding over the horizon, you probably need an excuse to stay in and relax. You’re in luck: we’re giving away another batch of digital copies of movies! This time, you […]
Continue readingNew Acquisitions – April 2013
We’re at the end of our purchasing season, so we’re adding one more batch of new titles for the semester. We have a couple Oscar nominees (Les Misérables, Anna Karenina, Life of Pi, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey), a few enlightening documentaries (including biographies of famous composers and an economist), some movies we probably […]
Continue readingMedia Services joins the library on a Muslim Journey
As part of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association, American University is participating in Muslim Journeys, part of the Bridging Cultures Bookshelf program. In addition to a number of new book acquisitions and a series of discussions from AU professors and scholars, Media Services has acquired three […]
Continue readingThe Invisible War screening on campus tonight at 8pm
The Invisible War, the 2012 documentary about sexual assault in the US military, has made significant waves in the military community since its release; then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta used the film as a starting point for broader program to address sexual assault in the military. It’s a powerful documentary. It may be emotionally difficult […]
Continue readingAfter a busy semester, what’s new from Media Services?
We’ve hit the end of the fiscal year, so we’ve temporarily stopped ordering new films. We’ve gotten many, many other interesting titles in the past month, so you can expect another New Acquisitions post shortly. In the meantime, we wanted to alert you to some of the big new titles trickling into our collections. Patrons […]
Continue readingYep, Game of Thrones is back on
If you’re friends with anyone with HBO, chances are you’ve heard that the third season of Game of Thrones premieres tonight. The latest installment in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy epic is sure to captivate audiences for the next two-or-so-months. And if the books are any indication, this is going to be a particularly violent […]
Continue readingHear Oliver Stone on JFK’s legacy TONIGHT!
Here’s last-minute announcement: Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone will be on campus this evening with friend-of-Media-Services Prof. Peter Kuznick to screen an episode of their Showtime documentary series, The Untold History of the United States. The event is part of AU’s commemoration of John F. Kennedy’s landmark commencement address at AU in which he heralded […]
Continue readingWe love our streaming videos, and you should too
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 […]
Continue readingArtist pushes Photoshop pushed to weird limits, turns rust into planets
The New Media Center is getting busy as we head into the second half of the semester, and a good number of our patrons are using Photoshop. The average user might use it to touch up a photo, add text, or do some graphic design work. But then there are the extreme outlier users like […]
Continue readingToday’s reminder to read: Even Jedis are illiterate
Media Services primarily deals with films, so even though we’re part of the American University Library, we don’t often get to talk about literacy and books. But once in a while, we get an opportunity to talk about both. Ryan Britt, an author at science fiction blog Tor.com, wrote a funny-but-deeply-concerning essay pointing out that […]
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