Hercules at Versailles (photo courtesy of the author)
When visited in person or even online, the Columbia libraries are huge, dense, and endlessly intimidating. Interesting books populate every shelf of Butler and CLIO search, and while you’d love to read them all—and incorporate them into your latest research project—you don’t need to kid yourself. Navigating the libraries successfully is not about ingesting as much information as possible, but quickly discerning what is useful and discarding all the rest.
That said, books and articles aren’t the only media that can contribute in relevant ways to your summer project, in-class literature review, or senior thesis. Videos can too—either in the familiar formats of the television episode or feature film, or in shorter fragmentary recordings or news segments. These can also be found in large repositories and databases that are available at no extra cost to Columbia students, but are often left unnoticed by those with only a cursory understanding of the libraries’ online resources. To give you a head start on incorporating that new medical documentary or investigative television report into your research project, here are a few of the best video streaming services and databases that Columbia has to offer:
Kanopy: If you’re looking for older film classics (think: Godard, Cassavetes, Kurosawa, Bergman) or contemporary global cinema (Bong Joon Ho, Michael Haneke, Jafar Panahi), then Kanopy is for you. With a huge range of independent films and documentaries as well, this is the best bet if you’re looking for something that would likely be taught in a film or literature class.
Swank Digital Campus: While Kanopy is the best resource for classic and foreign-language movies, Swank is where you go for American genre films and blockbusters. The service carries a huge range of contemporary English-language cinema, with everything from Spike Lee and Michael Moore to Kathryn Bigelow and Paul Thomas Anderson. While fewer of the movies on the service will be directly applicable to your academic work, there are plenty of period pieces and documentaries that could easily fit into the early stages of a research project, providing important context for further investigation.
Alexander Street Press: This resource is wider-ranging than either Kanopy or Swank, offering a huge number of documentaries, educational videos, and television programs, including recent hits like Ken Burns’ The American Revolution. Alexander Street also categorizes its videos into ‘channels’ that are based on topics (e.g. ‘Baroque and Rococo’, ‘1950s’, ‘W. E. B. Du Bois’, ‘Hawaiian Studies’), making it easier to comb through relevant groupings of materials without having a particular target video in mind. The service’s wide-ranging collection of 60 Minutes recordings and television documentaries have been especially helpful to me, offering digestible and engaging audiovisual representations of historical events and social issues.
Docuseek: Alongside Alexander Street, Docuseek is the best resource for streaming documentaries, offering a huge range of independent, low-budget films covering issues as wide-ranging as the American music industry, the invention of emojis, and conflict in the developing world. The ‘subjects’ tab at the top of the website is extremely comprehensive and finely discriminating, providing researchers with the option to distinguish between ‘Economic Theory’, ‘Economic Anthropology’, ‘Economic Sociology’, and ‘Neoliberal Economics’, for one.
I hope this brief overview of the primary video streaming resources that come bundled with your Columbia Libraries access was helpful. There are plenty more where those came from: just go to this website and see for yourself! As you make your way through the various platforms, make sure to stop and have a look around: you’re guaranteed to find a useful visual reference or informative news segment that enriches your research work, or even better, your intellectual and professional development writ large.