It’s Oscar season! And if you’re like us, you’re practicing your acceptance speech in between handfuls of popcorn both day and night, wiping the tears from your eyes and thanking your producers, your co-stars, and the Academy until the music starts playing to shoo you from the stage.
Before we relinquish our moment in the spotlight, we’d like to lean into the microphone one last time to tell you how to bring all the glitz and glam of the red carpet straight to your classroom, your home, and all of your electronic devices.
With hundreds of classic films and tens of thousands of documentaries, UK Libraries’ streaming media resources – including Kanopy, Swank, and Academic Video Online – have the cinematic masterpieces, cult favorites, and academic titles to satisfy the cinephile in all of us.
UK Libraries licenses over 260 titles from the Kanopy platform, including more than 40 movies from the Criterion Collection, a series of award-winning classic and contemporary films. Along with these classics, Kanopy’s collection specializes in unique and thought-provoking international and independent films that highlight underrepresented voices from around the world.
Access the collection by signing into Kanopy using your linkblue ID. Films from the collection can be played through the platform or through the Kanopy app, available on Apple, Amazon, and Google devices and many smart TVs, enabling easy at-home or on-campus viewing.
Kanopy allows users to create clips from films. Clips can be assembled into playlists or embedded in Canvas, making it easy for instructors to screen or assign sections of one or multiple films. Full films can also be embedded in Canvas. Find more information in the Kanopy tab of the Streaming Media Resources Library Guide.
With nearly 120 licensed titles, Swank contains UK Libraries’ greatest concentration of streaming classic films. From Citizen Kane to When Harry Met Sally, users can find timeless movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, New Hollywood and modern classics, sci-fi standards and noir thrillers, and contemporary box office hits like Barbie, Black Panther, and Get Out. Find the full collection of licensed titles by signing into Swank with your linkblue ID.
Swank also allows the embedding of films in Canvas, making for easy assignment creation.
Users can stream Swank titles on any Internet-connected device by playing films through the platform or using Swank’s media player, available for free through Apple and Google app stores. For more information, visit the Swank tab in the Streaming Media Resources Library Guide.
A massive video collection that spans cinema, instructional videos, and documentaries for every academic discipline, Academic Video Online (AVON) contains over 80,000 titles in subjects ranging from climate change and Black studies to mental health and American history.
AVON contains Counseling and Social Work collections with applied training and research materials, and a Theater collection with hundreds of recorded live performances. AVON also holds over 400 titles from Sony Pictures Classics, a producer and distributor of independent films, and an enormous collection of innovative and award-winning documentaries.
Like Kanopy, AVON allows for the creation of clips and easy embedding of videos into Canvas. AVON also fulfills requests for audio-described versions of its most popular films for visually impaired users. For more information on these features, visit the AVON tab in the Streaming Media Resources Library Guide.
As copyrighted materials, the public use of films is subject to certain restrictions. Streaming media often do not fall completely within the realm of copyright or fair use, but depend on license agreements between UK Libraries and each vendor platform. License agreements often vary from title to title, even across the same platform.
Generally, users can stream media from UK Libraries resources for individual research purposes, for use in the classroom, or to embed on Canvas. More limits exist for streaming media for public performances, especially events that are open to the public and not restricted to UK students, faculty, and staff.
UK’s Copyright Resource Center has general information on the use of copyrighted materials in the classroom. For questions about specific titles, please contact UK Libraries’ Electronic Resources Unit at lib-er@lsv.uky.edu.
Most titles in our collections are licensed for one to three years, and are acquired at the request of instructors for use in UK courses.
