Digital Video Collections Guide

Licensed Streaming Video Collections

These are amazing collections of streaming video titles the UMN Libraries have licensed. These collections are restricted to University affiliates (requiring .x500 for off campus access).

Open Video Collection Websites

Below is a guide of quality, freely accessible, collections of online video.*

• American Archive of Public Broadcasting
  The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is a "collection of 40,000 hours contains thousands of high quality programs that have had national impact. The vast majority of this initial American Archive content, however, consists of regional and local programs that document American communities during the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. This extraordinary collection includes local news and public affairs programs, local history productions that document the heritage of local communities, and programs dealing with education, environmental issues, music, art, literature, dance, poetry, religion, and even filmmaking on a local level."

• AP Archive Video
  AP Archive is the film and video archive of The Associated Press -- the world's largest and oldest news agency. Our cameramen have been capturing the iconic moments that have shaped the world in which we live and we have over 1.7 million news, sports, entertainment and fashion stories dating back to 1895 to share with you, here and on our British Movietone channel - https://www.youtube.com/c/BritishMovietone

• Archaeology Channel Video
  The Archaeology Channel provides free access to a large collection of streaming media covering archaeology worldwide.

• Archive of American Television
  Hosted by the TV Academy Foundation this archive provides access to hundreds of in-depth video interviews with TV's greatest legends and pioneers. These television history interviews can be browsed by person, show, topic or profession. New interviews and indexes are added regularly.

• ART:21
  Created by P.B.S., this Web site is patterned after a nationally broadcast series on contemporary art, artists, and ideas. Among other things, this site has an online lesson library, teacher materials and discussions. Full episodes are available in the PBS video portal.

• BBC History of the World in 100 Objects
  Director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, narrates 100 programs that retell humanity's history through the objects we have made. Each episode consists of an image of the item discussed, and a radio narration lasting about 15 minutes.

• BBC News Archive
  Provides online access to BBC's archives including themed collections of radio and TV programs, documents and photographs.

• British Movietone (see also: AP Archive)
  British Movietone is arguably the world's greatest newsreel archive, spanning the period 1895 – 1986. Shot on 35mm film, this global archive contains many of the world's enduring images and is rich in coverage of news events, celebrities, sports, music, social history, science, lifestyle and quirky happenings. It was the first newsreel to include sound, the first to use colour film, the first to break many exclusive stories, and is your first and last stop for newsreel footage. see also: AP Archive

• British National Archives Media Player
  Collections of British National Archives digitized and original video and audio content, including categories of Family History, Military History, Social History, Political History, Law and Order, Archives, and International.

• British Pathé
  A collection of 85,000 films: "Spanning the years from 1896 to 1976, the collection includes footage not only from Britain, but from around the globe of major events, famous faces, fashion trends, travel, sport and culture. The archive is particularly strong in its coverage of the First and Second World Wars."

• CDC TV
  Web visitors can now view or download videos on a variety of health, safety and preparedness topics. The library of videos will expand to include single-topic presentations as well as different video series focused on children, parents, and public health professionals.

• Cineteca (University of Chile)
  The Cineteca (University of Chile), the oldest film archive in the country, has made over 150 films spanning the entire history of national cinema freely available to download or stream online.

• C-SPAN Video Library
  Contains all C-SPAN programs since 1987, indexed, abstracted, and cataloged by the C-SPAN Archives staff. Programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and location. The congressional sessions and committee hearings are indexed by person with full-text.

• Civil Rights Digital Library
  Provides access to online films, texts, images, and audio recordings related to the Civil Rights movement in the United States in the 1950's and 1960's. CRDL is a partnership among librarians, technologists, archivists, educators, scholars, academic publishers, and public broadcasters. The initiative receives support through a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site provides both simple keyword searching and advanced searching. Content also can be browsed by Events, Places, People, Topics, Media Types (including print, government records, correspondences, etc.) Other features of the site include numerous instructional materials, including lesson plans, quizzes, slide shows, study guides, and worksheets.

• Civios
  An initiative of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Civios offers short and visually engaging digital materials to inform public affairs discussions. These materials translate policy-relevant scholarly research for policymakers, practitioners, and the broader public.

• Culture Unplugged
  Culture Unplugged (C.U.) provides access to hundreds of documentary films, that spans multiple facets of global issues, produced through a "socially and spiritually conscious" lens. Note: This link defaults to documentaries from CU's virtual film festival. Scroll down and select "Show Films from Archive" for access to more content.

• Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Video Collections
  The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. Individuals can access a trove of thousands of videos across these institutions through DPLA's search interface (by selecting the "moving images" filter on results after performing a keyword search).
   
• Ensia Video Archive
  "Ensia is a solutions-focused nonprofit media outlet reporting on our changing planet."  Their mission is to "motivate and empower people around the world to create a more sustainable future by sharing stories and igniting conversations across sectors, geographies, ideologies and disciplines."  All videos are licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.

• Europeana
  A collection of 29 million digital images of paintings, music, films and books from Europe's galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Included are images, texts, sounds and videos.

• EUscreen
  The EUscreen portal offers free online access to thousands of items of audiovisual heritage. It brings together clips that provide an insight into the social, cultural, political and economic events that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. As well as chronicling important historical events, the EUscreen portal allows you to explore television programmes that focus on everyday experience. EUscreen is also intended to be a resource for educators, researchers and media professionals searching for new audiovisual content from across Europe. Note: see http://euscreen.openimages.eu/media for CC licensed content shared for repurposing.

• EVIA Digital Archive Project - Ethnographic Video for Instruction & Analysis
  Collaborative endeavor to create a digital archive of ethnographic field video for use by scholars and instructors. Funded since 2001 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with significant contributions from Indiana University and the University of Michigan, the Project has been developed through the joint efforts of ethnographic scholars, archivists, librarians, technologists, and legal experts. Beyond the primary mission of digitally preserving ethnographic field video, the EVIA Project has also invested significantly in the creation of software and systems for the annotation, discovery, playback, peer review, and scholarly publication of video and accompanying descriptions. Viewing videos requires registering for an account and agreeing to the end-user license agreement.

• Folkstreams
  Provides streaming access to a large collection of documentary films about American folk, or roots, cultures. Includes essays about the traditions and filmmakes, transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites. Site provides simple keyword and advanced searching, as well as ability to brose by subjects, regions, titles, filmmakers, and other categories. Video displays include links to additional, related films.

• Frontline
  View complete episodes of a large selection of films from the acclaimed PBS public affairs series.

• Global Performing Arts Database

• The Great Depression Interviews
  From the stock market crash of 1929 to the beginnings of World War II, The Great Depression tells the dramatic and diverse stories of struggle and survival during the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. Originally debuting on PBS stations in 1993, the 7-part series was met with critical acclaim, winning an Emmy for writing and a duPont-Columbia Award. These interviews are part of the Henry Hampton Collection housed at the Film & Media Archive at Washington University Libraries. Each video and transcript represents the entire interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., including portions that did not appear in the final program. For more information, please contact the Film & Media Archive.

• HEAL: Health Education Assets Library
  A national repository/referatory of free, web-based multimedia teaching materials in the health sciences. The collection is comprised of images, animations, videos and audio-files. Registration is required.

• HealthLibrary Online
  The Stanford Health Library provides a collection of online videos covering various health topics, including health and society, cancer support, and women's health. Videos may be viewable online through Stanford University iUniversity (iTunes interface) or QuickTime, or available for purchase on DVD. Not all videos are available for online viewing.

• HippoCampus
  A project of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), HippoCampus provides high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects to high school and college students. Content is organized by broad disciplines: Algebra, American Government, Biology, Calculus, Environmental Science, Physics, Psychology, Religion, Statistics, US History. The site was designed as part of Open Education Resources (OER), a worldwide effort to improve access to quality education. Colleges and universities develop the content and contributes it to the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), another MITE project. Both HippoCampus and NROC are supported by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

• History Channel Video
  Selected full length History Channel programs.

• Hubert Project
  The Hubert Project, sponsored by the University of Minnesota Humphrey School for Public Affairs, offers a collection of public affairs learning materials (including video case studies), that can be used to incorporate into teaching, training or self-guided professional development.

• Hulu
  A partnership between NBC and ABC (Disney), Hulu is predominantly a site for television content. Hulu distributes video both on its own website and syndicates its hosting to other sites, and allows users to embed Hulu clips on their websites. In addition to NBC, ABC and FOX programs and movies, Hulu carries shows from other networks such as Comedy Central, PBS, USA Network, Bravo, FX, Syfy, Sundance, E!, and other commercial producers. The Channel link at the bottom of the Hulu homepage provides a broad subject organization of its content, including "News and Information" which includes sub-categories of Current News, Documentary & Biography, Live Events & Specials, and Politics.

• Internet Archive
  The Moving Image Archive within the Internet Archive provides access to nearly a quarter million films, uploaded by Archive users, and ranging from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Videos in the Archive are organized into 15 broad sub-categories: Animation and Cartoons, Arts & Music, Computers & Technology, Cultural & Academic Films, Ephemeral Films, Home Movies, Movies, News & Public Affairs, Open Source Movies, Spirituality & Religion, Sports Videos, Video Games, Vlogs, and Youth Media. The Archive also contains the Prelinger Archive, the most complete and varied collection of ephemeral films (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) in existence.

• Internet Archive: TV News
  The Internet Archive works to preserve the published works of human kind. Inspired by Vanderbilt University's Television News Archive project, the Internet Archive collects and preserves television news. Like library collections of books and newspapers, this accessible archive of TV news enables anyone to reference and compare statements from this influential medium. The collection now contains 350,000 news programs collected over 3 years from national U.S. networks and stations in San Francisco and Washington D.C. The archive is updated with new broadcasts 24 hours after they are aired. Older materials are also being added.

• Internet Movie Database
  The most comprehensive movie source on the web. Provides information on movies around the world, from earliest times to the latest releases. Includes filmographies, plot summaries, reviews, biographical data, etc.

• iTunes U
  A diverse range of freely available courses spanning a wide array of disciplines from multiple institutions.

• Journey of Documentary
  The Journey of Documentary is a web series about the evolution of documentary. This web series features interviews from award winning filmmakers and experts collaborating on all things documentary. Each webisode contains advice, knowledge and personal insights from experts in their chosen field.

• Khan Academy
  With a library of over 2,400 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 125 practice exercises, we're on a mission to help you learn whatever you want, whenever you want, at your own pace.

• Learners TV
  This is a comprehensive site providing thousands of streaming and downloadable video lectures, live nnline Tests, and other materials in the fields of Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Dentistry, Engineering, History, Language Training, Law, Literature, Management and Accounting, Mathematics, Medicine, Nursing, Physics, and Psychology. The site provides free video and audio lectures of whole courses conducted by university faculty from around the world. Most of the materials offered are licensed by the respective institutes under a Creative Commons License.

• Med-Mem Mediterranean Memory
  A free video archive library; thousands of videos preserve the historic, cultural and tourism heritage of the area. English, French, and Arabic. Co-founded by the European Union.

• Media Burn
  The Media Burn Archive is a collection of over 6,000 independent, non-corporate tapes that reflect cultural, political and social reality as seen by independent producers, from 1969 to the present.

• Merlot
  Includes animations and other learning resources.

• Mike Wallace, The Interviews
  Video of 65 interviews from the television series hosted by the late Mike Wallace from 1957 and 1958. Provided by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Each program includes a text transcript. Available interviewees include Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Margaret Sanger, and Salvador Dali among other notables of the time.

• MIT Open Courseware
  MIT instructors provide a range of courses freely available online.

• Movieclips
  Provides more than 12,000 short clips from feature films licensed from Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. The Movieclips player can be embedded in social networks as Facebook and MySpace, and shared on blogs, Twitter and other personal websites, and used in PowerPoint presentations. In addition to searching by title or actor, the site provide additional search capabilities for dialogue, genre, action, occassion, theme, and mood and categories including best kiss, tearjerkers, birthdays, holidays, awkward moments, action moments, bad guys and fight scenes. Reuse of the clips requires registering with the site.

• Museum of Broadcast Communications Archive
  The archive includes more than 8,500 digitized television shows, radio programs, and photos. Note: current message suggests site is undergoing update 9/15/14

• National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films (NCFMF)
  A series of films created by Ascher Shapiro in the 1960s, used to teach fluid mechanics.

• National Film Board of Canada
  The National Film Board of Canada is a Canadian government agency that produces and distributes documentary, animation, alternative drama and digital media productions. The NFB website provides information on over 13,000 National Film Board of Canada films, and includes free access to over 2,000 films, excerpts, trailers, and interactive works for online screening.

• National Geographic Video
  Video programs from Nat Geo TV and web only audiovisual material.

• National Parks Service B-Roll Video
  This webpage provides links to public domain video of some of those sites, including national parks, monuments, battlefields, historic sites and related areas. This content is great for remixing, reuse in projects and publication.

• NOVA
  Provides access to selected programs from the acclaimed PBS science series. Programs are divided into chapters and have closed captioning. Available videos are organized by broad subject categories: Anthropology, Disasters, Earth, Exploration, Flight, Health, History, Investigations, Nature, Physics & Math, Space, and Technology.

• Open Video Project
  A University of North Carolina project to create free repository of archival, documentary and educational video.

• PBS Learning Media
  Developed by PBS, WNET, and KET, and 31 other PBS stations.  Content contributed from publicly funded organizations, including the National Archives, the Library of Congress and NPR, NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Education, delivers thousands of resources for use in the classroom and with home-schoolers. Content aligns with Common Core State Standards for preK-16 classrooms.  This collection contains more that than 114,000 research-based instructional resources – including videos, interactives, images, audio files, mobile apps, lesson plans, and worksheets. Requires personal registration on the site.

• PBS Great Performances
  Classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries.

• PBS Video
  Provides access to selected programs from selected PBS series (such as Nature, American Experience, Nova, and Frontline, among others.)  Users can browse by Programs, Topics, or Collections. Individual programs are subdivided into smaller segments.

• Penn Museum Film Archives
  The Penn Museum Archives has an extensive collection of films that, thanks to the generosity of the Internet Archive, are nearly all available online. The online film collection consists of over 700 archival films.

• PopTech
  Videos of global tech innovators.

• P.O.V. Video
  Provides a selection of full length films, short films, and lesson plan based clips from the acclaimed PBS documentary film series POV.

• Society of Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) Video
  Includes videos of SAGES meetings, information on surgeries and techniques, in addition to surgery videos.

• Southern Foodways Alliance Documentary Films
  Southern Foodways Alliance produces several films in concert with the University of Mississippi's Center for Documentary Projects

• ScienceCinema
  Contains multimedia videos highlighting the U.S. Department of Energy's scientific research.  State-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology allows the user to search for specific words and phrases spoken by the presenter in these video files. Simply enter a term and the results list will point to the precise snippets of the video where the term was spoken.

• Smithsonian Institution - Collection Search Center
  Search over 6.4 million records with 536,000 images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives & libraries.

• Stanford Health Video Library
  Videos and audio sorted by category on a wide range of medicinal and dental topics.

• TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design
  Talks are organized under broad subject categories:  Technology, Entertainment, Design, Business, Science, and Global Issues.

• Thanhouser Films Online
  More than 50 films provide a representative cross section of the output produced by the Thanhouser film enterprise based in New Rochelle, New York between 1910 and 1917. The films were assembled over the past 25 years with the cooperation of archives around the world, including The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, The British Film Institute in London, England, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York, the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, California, the EYE Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam, Holland, and from the Thanhouser collection. Each film includes a summary and analysis written by film historian Victor Graf.  Andrew Crow, Raymond A. Brubacher and Ben Model composed and performed original musical accompaniment commissioned exclusively for this collection.

• TIB|AV Portal
  The German National Library of Science and Technology`s AV-Portal (English/ German) provides access to scientific videos from the fields of engineering as well as architecture, chemistry, information technology, mathematics and physics. By combining multimedia analysis techniques, such as scene-, speech- and image recognition as well as a semantic search approach the TIB|AV Portal provides optimised search results. By using the open standard Media Fragment Identifier (MFID) a citable Digital Object Identifier is displayed for each video segment: www.av.getinfo.de.

• TPT MN Video Vault
  The MN Video Vault is a project of Twin Cities Public Television. The Vault contains hundreds of programs from the tpt archives: classic interviews and performances from Nighttimes Variety, Newsnight Minnesota and Almanac as well as a broad cross-section of tpt documentaries. Also included are current tpt productions, as well as programs from other regional public television stations. And soon, the MN Video Vault will feature new web-only tpt productions.

• UC Berkeley Media Resources Center Online Media
  A collection online video and audio recordings of notable lectures, events, and readings held at University of California, Berkeley.  This database includes both video materials accessible by the general public, and videos licensed for access by current University of California, Berkeley students, faculty, and staff only (CalNet authentication required). Audio recordings in the collection are accessible by all users. Access to the videos in the collection requires Windows Media player. Macintosh users will need the free Flip4Mac plug-in.  Access to the audio recordings in the collection requires the Real player. The site includes a simple keyword search interface. Linked from within this site are audio, video, and text files from the UC Berkeley Library Social Activism Sound Recording Project.  This collection includes information onf the Free Speech Movement, the Black Panther Party, Anti-Vietnam War Protests in the San Francisco Area and Beyond, and LGBT History.

• UMedia Archive (UMN)
  Discover and learn about the rich collections available through the UMedia Archive.

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Moving Images Collections
  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) collections includes over 4,500 moving image historical records (e.g., propaganda films, Newsreel footage) and over 7,600 hours of streaming video oral history testimonials.

• University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies (CHGS) Video Library
  Watch digitized videos of Holocaust survivors, American concentration camp liberators, lectures on the Armenian Genocide, testimonies by second generation Armenians living in Minnesota, and other lectures of note at the University of Minnesota or other campuses in the region.

• USDA Food Safety Videos (YouTube)
  View the various food safety and inspection streaming videos and audio files available from the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

• USDA Youtube Channel
  The USDA YouTube channel contains over 300 videos of video features, training videos and speeches related to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

• Veoh
  Provides access to videos from major content publishers like CBS, ABC, WB, MTV Networks, ESPN, Sony/BMG and Lions Gate, other video sites like YouTube and Hulu, as well as independent filmmakers and content producers. Users can sort content by type using pull-down menus for Videos, TV Shows, or Movies, each with sub-menus including categories such as Documentary & Biography. Brief commercials precede video playback. Watching full-length videos via Veoh requires installation of the Veoh Web Player.

• Vimeo
  Vimeo is a well known video sharing site specializing in user-generated content, media production howto videos, independent films, and educational video (several universities have an official Vimeo channel).

• Wellcome Film: Digitizing Medical History
  Online collection of moving images on 20th-century healthcare and medicine. Over 450 titles - 100 hours of historical film and video - have been transferred and are freely available under Creative Commons licences.

• WGBH Open Vault
  Provides online access to unique and historically important content produced by the public television and radio station WGBH. The ever-expanding site contains video, audio, images, searchable transcripts, and resource management tools, all of which are available for individual and classroom learning.

• Wikimedia Commons
  Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content including images, sound and video clips.

• YouTube Movies
  YouTube Movies provides access to thousands of commercial films (mostly Studio) across most popular film genres. Though many films require a rental cost, there are hundreds of free films legally available in this section, some of which are public domain others, shared with permission from the rights holder.

• YouTube

• Acknowledgements:
  Acknowledgements: Much of the open content collections and compilation has been reproduced with permission, from the Arizona State University "Internet Sites for Streaming Video" Guide: http://libguides.asu.edu/content.php?pid=90855&sid=676587. Many thanks to ASU media librarian, deg farrelly, for his willingness to share this amazing bibliography! Many additional selections and resource descriptions were culled from the LibGuides Community as part of a comprehensive project to identify exemplar digital video collections.

• Disclaimer
  UMN Libraries is not responsible for any of the content linked from these sites. We cannot guarantee availability of the content they provide, nor assume responsibility for the functionality of these sites. Copyright use understanding is the responsibility of the patron - see the UMN copyright site for more information: http://www.lib.umn.edu/copyright/