MULTI MEDIA SOURCES

FREE OPEN SOURCE VIDEO

The American Experience, PBS A widely-recognized (winner of Emmy Awards, George Foster Peabody Awards, and an Academy Award nomination, among others) documentary series focused on American History. It offers full-length films, film clips, and digital shorts. 

American Memory, Library of Congress Films and videos covering a wide range of topics including American music, film, and Civil Rights, in the Library of Congress Digital Collections.

The Annenberg Learner Multimedia resources for K-12 teachers with an emphasis on student learning and on professional development.

The Civil Rights Digital Library Archival moving images, reference resources and instructional resources for educators.

Documentary Heaven Educational documentaries covering a wide range of topics and presented from varying points of view, organizing by category and searchable by frequency of use.

Folkstreams A non-profit site dedicated to finding, preserving, contextualizing, and showcasing documentary films on American traditional cultures. In its "Rights" section, it notes that the film makers have given permission to stream their work for users to watch free of charge on their home computers, but that for other permissions, i.e., downloading, using the footage in other projects or videos, or projecting the streams in a classroom or institution, the user should apply to Folkstreams or to the filmmaker, whose film may available as a high quality DVD from a distributor.

Forum Network "The Forum Network is a public media service that makes freely-available hundreds of video and audio lectures from scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policymakers, and community leaders. Major support is provided by The Lowell Institute, an organization created to carry out the 1836 bequest of John Lowell Jr., to make free public lectures available to the citizens of Boston and beyond."

FRONTLINE A PBS documentary series with a focus on investigative journalism regarding contemporary issues in American Society.

Internet Archive, Moving Image Archive Almost 6,000,000 titles available to download or view, including feature films (predominantly older titles), news media, and television programs/clips/commercials. Search is intuitive but not advanced.

National Film Board of Canada Access to a broad range of films, documentaries, and their amazing animations. The site also includes 65 subjects for broad search capability and a brief collection of curated clips for the classroom. You can find use Advanced search on the institutional web site, but it is not linked back to the online collection.

NOVA, PBS. Excellent source of educational videos on a range of topics, from Arts and Culture to Drama and Food. Create a free account to expand your viewing options.

POV, PBS "POV (a cinema term for “point of view”) is television’s longest-running showcase for independent nonfiction films. POV premieres 14-16 of the best, boldest and most innovative programs every year on PBS. Since 1988, POV has presented over 500 films to public television audiences across the country. POV films are known for their intimacy, their unforgettable storytelling and their timeliness, putting a human face on contemporary social issues."

Open Video Project (UNC Chapel Hill) "The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries." 

TED Talks "TED is a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks. TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 110 languages." Provocative, often brilliant, many presentations can serve as a launch for serious class discussion.

Wikipedia Commons "Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language." Drill down through the links to search by category.

YouTube  YouTube is a video sharing service that allows users to watch videos posted by other users and upload videos of their own. Search is simple, you can subscribe to channels that you like, or save sites for viewing later. To filter your results for material with a CC BY Creative Commons license, click on Filter when you get your search results and select "Creative Commons" under Features. Most material is free but others you can buy or rent, or watch for free if you don't mind the ads. 

Explore the Google Cultural Institute

Remix and Reuse more than 400,000 high resolution images from the MET's OPEN ACCESS REPOSITORY (and use their comprehensive finding aid at Github)