Research Guides: Critical Media Practices: Multimedia

Streaming Films & Documentaries

Docuseek
Independent, documentary, and social issues films. Also includes a selection of international feature films.
Electronic Arts Intermix Educational Streaming
Provides access to full-length streaming art videos.
Alexander Street (Alexander Street)
A search interface that provides access to audio, video, and text resources from Alexander Street Press.
Kanopy
Kanopy offers over 8,500 streaming films, documentaries, educational and training videos from an array of producers and distributors including BBC Active and Criterion Collection/Janus films. All videos work on PCs with Flash, iPads, iPhones, and mobile devices.
Bloomsbury Video Library
An international collection of performances, masterclasses, documentaries and interviews from top artists and producers.
Swank Digital Campus
Streaming service featuring films, independent films and documentaries. Access note: Please clear browser cookies/cache before use. All videos work on PCs, however will only stream on mobile devices by downloading the Swank mobile app. For more information, visit the Swank FAQ page.
Must use VPN to access this database from off campus.

UbuWeb
Collection of online avant-garde film, video, and performance.
Prelinger Archives
Collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions.
Internet Archive: Television
Collections of items recorded from television, including commercials, old television shows, government proceedings and more.
National Screening Room
The Library of Congress's collection of digitized historical films, commercials, newsreels and other clips

TV News Broadcasts

Internet Archive Television News
Search the captions of news shows going back to 2009 on all major channels including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, among many others. Full streaming video available.

Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Find video clips from news shows going back to 1968 on ABC, CBs, and NBC. CNN is available form 1995. Only NBC and CNN are available streaming, other channels are available by DVD loan.
Access World News Research Collection
Online access to major national and international newspapers, as well as local and regional titles. Also includes newswires, blogs, web-only content, videos, journals, magazines, transcripts and more.
60 Minutes: 1997-2014 (Alexander Street)
Complete episodes of the CBS news program from 1997 to 2014.

Music

Naxos Music Library
Comprehensive streaming audio database for classical repertoire.
Met Opera on Demand
Online access to 550 full-length performances from the Metropolitan Opera. Includes interviews with artists, composers, conductors, and others associated with an individual production.

Image & Media Collections

These databases host a wide variety of content from many contributors, most what they contain is either in the public domain or made available via free culture licenses:

Wikimedia Commons
Database of millions of freely usable image and media files.
Internet Archive
Flickr Commons
Collection of openly available images.
Creative Commons Search
Can a search a variety of web databases for creative commons licensed content

These databases host the digitized collections of museums, libraries and archives and are generally in the public domain:

Digital Public Library of America
Brings together the digitized images and media of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
Europeana
An internet portal that acts as an interface to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised.
CU Digital Library
Digitized content from the CU System, including CU Boulder MFA theses images.
Smithsonian Collections
Search across the diverse collection of Smithsonian Institute museums.
NYPL Digital Collections
Items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
The digitized images from the Library of Congress includes photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters and architectural and engineering drawings. While international in scope, the collections are particularly rich in materials produced in, or documenting the history of, the United States and the lives, interests and achievements of the American people.

These library subscription databases have a wide variety of images, but have restrictive licensing agreements that generally restrict use to class projects that are not openly available:

ARTstor
Database of over one million high-quality images, useful not only for the fine arts but as a general image resource.
AP Newsroom (EBSCO)
Photos from the Associated Press, illustrating major news events and important figures over the last 160 years.

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Critical Media Practices: Multimedia

Streaming Films & Documentaries

TV News Broadcasts

Music

Image & Media Collections

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