The library has recently expanded its offerings of online videos by acquiring the Black Studies in Video collection from Alexander Street Press. This recent acquisition expands the library’s holdings in the area of Black History and Literature adding video content to the existing Black Thought and Culture collection. You can get access to Black Studies in Video by going directly to: http://blst.alexanderstreet.com.
The Black Studies in Video collection is a seminal video collection consisting of archival footage, powerful interviews with leading figures in the civil rights movement, and documentaries examining the black experience in the arts, politics, public and private life, and much more. The collection was developed in partnership with California Newsreel, the oldest nonprofit social issue documentary film center in the United States, and the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) which provided streaming to its Legacy Video Collection.
At present, the collection contains over 140 videos from 1969 – 2011 totaling 141 hours and upon completion, the collection will contain 500 hours of film covering African American history, politics, art and culture, family structure, gender relationships, and social and economic issues. The database will also draw from the NAACP archives, archives from select Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and the Hatch-Billops Collection, a critically acclaimed archive of primary and secondary resource materials focused on black American art, drama, and literature.
There are numerous access points for locating content as users can browse by people, themes, topics, filmmaker, country of origin, production date, producer, and other features. The service provides synchronized, searchable transcripts that run alongside each video. Users can also search all video transcripts, liner notes, bibliographic data (including series, title, country of origin, publication date, narrator, production staff, and more), and many other indexed fields, including person discussed, year discussed, and all of the browse options listed above.
