LibGuides: Film & Video Resources: Video Databases

Video Databases

Video databases cover a wide range of subjects including history, human rights, anthropology, art, architecture, dance, theater, counseling and therapy, education, ethnography, and opera. For streamed feature films and documentaries, look at the "Streaming Resources" tab on the left.

AccessEngineering This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly. Provides access to hundreds of McGraw Hill handbooks, textbooks and monographs across all engineering fields, a materials properties visualization tool, downloadable spreadsheets, and instructional videos.
AILLA (The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America) This link opens in a new window
A digital archive of recordings and texts in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America. Includes recordings of naturally-occurring discourse in a wide range of genres, including narratives, ceremonies, oratory, conversations, and songs. Many of these recordings are accompanied by transcriptions and translations in either Spanish, English, or Portuguese. Also collects materials about these languages, such as grammars, dictionaries, ethnographies, and research notes.
Al-Monitor: The Pulse of the Middle East This link opens in a new window
Updated daily. A new media site that provides access to newspaper articles from independent media partners throughout the Arab World, including Turkey, Israel, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq. Each day, editors translate Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish reporting and commentary on politics and religion, business and economics, society and culture, and the arts and sports. The service has an international editorial board and also provides original reporting and commentary.
American History In Video This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly. This collection allows students and researchers to analyze historical events, and their presentation over time, through documentaries, commercial and governmental newsreels and archival and public affairs footage. The full runs of newsreels from United Newsreel and Universal Newsreel from 1929 through 1967 are included. On 14th September 2012, American History in Video was updated. As of this update there are 6,002 videos (including 3,211 documentaries) equaling 1,616 hours in American History in Video.
Users may also make isolated clips from the videos and save them in a free account available for registration set up within the database.
Anthropology Online This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive resource for the study of human culture and behavior. Features cross-searchable access to the acclaimed Ethnographic Video Online and Anthropology Online collections and provides anthropologists, sociologists and cultural historians with an expansive and multifaceted survey of the discipline. Researchers can explore a wide range of materials—from documentaries and field notes to written ethnographies and reference works.
Thematic areas include: family and race, material culture, language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, culture and personality, marriage, gender, and family roles.
Art and Architecture In Video This link opens in a new window
A collection of documentaries and interviews illustrating the theory and practice of a variety of art forms and providing the context necessary for critical analysis. The collection spans time period and region, including coverage of the Renaissance, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Modern, and Contemporary Art. In addition to art history and theory, the collection addresses applied topics such as architectural and graphic design. The breadth of coverage makes this collection integral to both scholarship and technique, providing access to the seminal artists and works who continue to inspire the artists, architects, designers and critics of today.
Asian Film Online This link opens in a new window
An online streaming video collection of nearly 600 narrative feature films, documentaries, and shorts. Offers a view of Asian culture as seen through the lens of the independent Asian filmmaker. Through a selection curated by film scholars and critics, viewers can explore the impact of globalization and urbanization on people’s everyday lives throughout the greater Asian region. Twenty-four countries across the region are represented, with a strong concentration on China, India, Iran, South Korea, and Southeast Asia.
BBC Shakespeare Plays This link opens in a new window
Provides streaming access to the highly acclaimed BBC television productions of all 37 Shakespeare plays. Filmed between 1978 and 1985, the videos include performances by some of Britain's most distinguished actors and actresses and are widely used in education. Each play may be viewed in its entirety or by acts, and all videos have optional closed captioning.
Viewing these videos requires a high-speed Internet connection, audio capabilities, and a current web browser, such as Chrome, Safari, or Firefox.
Birds of the World This link opens in a new window
Birds of the World (BOW) is a research database that brings together scholarly content from four major works of ornithology: Birds of North America, The Handbook of Birds of the World, Neotropical Birds, and Bird Families of the World. It also merges millions of bird observations from eBird and multimedia from the Macaulay Library into a single platform where biologists and birders can explore comprehensive life history information on birds. Includes over 10,800 species accounts with details on appearance, taxonomy, habitat, diet, breeding, behavior; 249 bird family accounts; range maps, eBird abundance maps, and animated migration maps; color illustrations of every species and many subspecies; media galleries showing the bird throughout its life cycle (photos, videos, and sound recordings from the Macaulay Library); an avian taxonomy explorer with regional filters, and more.
Black Studies in Video This link opens in a new window
This collection is a black studies portfolio that brings together seminal documentaries, powerful interviews, and previously unavailable archival footage surveying the black experience. The collection contains 500 hours of film covering African American history, politics, art and culture, family structure, gender relationships, and social and economic issues.
Counseling and Therapy in Video This link opens in a new window
Provides the largest and richest online collection of video available for the study of counseling, social work, psychotherapy, psychology, and psychiatric counseling. The collection's wealth of video and multiplicity of perspectives allow students and scholars to
Users may also make isolated clips from the videos and save them in a free account available for registration set up within the database.
Dance Online: Dance in Video Vol. I-IV This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly until completion. Contains dance productions and documentaries by the most influential performers and companies of the 20th century. Selections cover performances of ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance. Included are classic performances from top ballet companies and experimental works from up-and-coming dance troupes. Dance in Video, Vol. IV includes Dancio, “an exceptional catalog of world-class instructors each offering Dancio expertise across an array of diverse dance styles ranging from ballet to contemporary.”
Users may also make isolated clips from the videos and save them in a free account available for registration set up within the database.
Additional information on basic system requirements for both PC and Mac platforms is available on the site.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) This link opens in a new window
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) contains metadata records —information describing an item —for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the content provider’s website. The DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.
Digital Theatre Plus This link opens in a new window
Full length British theatre productions, interviews with cast and crew, and documentaries about the production. Includes productions from Shakespeare to contemporary plays, with teaching guides. This database also includes Broadway HD, opera, musical theatre, dance/ballet, symphonic and chamber music, as well as theatre from Russia and 20+ from South Asia, and film shorts.
Docuseek Complete Collection: 4th Edition This link opens in a new window
The Docuseek Complete Collection (4th edition) provides exclusive educational streaming access to over 2000 important documentaries from renowned distribution leaders, including Bullfrog Films, Icarus Films, dGenerate Films, Women Make Movies, GOOD DOCS, Collective Eye Films, First Run Features, National Film Board of Canada, KimStim, European distributors First Hand Films, AndanaFilms, Cinétévé, and new producing and distributing partners 371 Productions, Lightdox, Autlook, Dutch CORE, Ideas Roadshow, and other participating filmmakers and distributors. This collection will include 3000 titles by December 2026.
Docuseek Global Environmental Justice Collection (GEJ) This link opens in a new window
Curated collection of 35 documentaries and teacher’s guides that can be used in a wide range of subject areas, from Asian, environmental, and Indigenous studies to law, geography, anthropology, global health, policy, and conservation biology. The films in the collection were selected by faculty from Whittier College, Yale, Bates College, Brandeis, and NYU who also wrote the teacher's guides.
Education in Video This link opens in a new window
Updated frequently. A collection of streaming videos compiled for training and developing teachers. It includes teaching demonstrations, lectures, documentaries, and primary-source footage of students and teachers in actual classrooms. Search and browse the collection by grade level; subject (mathematics, language arts, etc.); topic (special education, literacy, multicultural education, etc.); educational theory; and other criteria. As of the November 20, 2012 release, Education in Video provides 3,874 titles, equaling approximately 1,025 hours of video.
Users may also make isolated clips from the videos and save them in a free account available for registration set up within the database.
Ethnographic Video Online, Vols. I & II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive resource for the study of human culture and behavior. Features cross-searchable access to the acclaimed Ethnographic Video Online and Anthropology Online collections and provides anthropologists, sociologists and cultural historians with an expansive and multifaceted survey of the discipline. Researchers can explore a wide range of materials—from documentaries and field notes to written ethnographies and reference works.
Thematic areas include: family and race, material culture, language and culture, kinesthetics, body language, food and foraging, cooking, economic systems, social stratification and status, caste systems and slavery, male and female roles, kinship and families, political organization, conflict and conflict resolution, religion and magic, music and the arts, culture and personality, marriage, gender, and family roles.
Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies This link opens in a new window
The Fortunoff Archive currently holds more than 4,400 testimonies, which are comprised of over 12,000 recorded hours of videotape. Testimonies were produced in cooperation with 36 affiliated projects across North America, South America, Europe, and Israel, and each project maintains a duplicate collection of locally recorded videotapes. The Fortunoff Archive and its affiliates recorded the testimonies of willing individuals with first-hand experience of the Nazi persecutions, including those who were in hiding, survivors, bystanders, resistants, and liberators. Testimonies were recorded in whatever language the witness preferred, and range in length from 30 minutes to over 40 hours (recorded over several sessions).

The archive is accessible to UT affiliates both on and off campus, as well as to non-UT walk-in visitors on campus. All users would need to create an account with Yale’s Aviary, the Fortunoff Archive's digital access system. Searching and browsing is done through that personal account. There is no cost involved. UT affiliates could also access their Aviary account, and the archive, through a proxy connection to UT and/or a VPN.
Henry Stewart Talks: Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection This link opens in a new window
Updated irregularly. Online access to lectures and talks by recognized experts. Series include
1. Agricultural Genetics
2. Antivirals
3. Vaccines
4. Antibiotic Resistance
5. The Cell Division Cycle
6. Gastroenterology and Hepatology
7. Epigenetics
8. Chloroplast
9. Nanomedicine
10. Evolutionary Physiology
HistoryMakers This link opens in a new window
This resource’s unique content is primarily composed of video oral histories recording the African American experience in the first-person. Testimonies captured in The HistoryMakers Collection interviews are conducted in homes and offices across the United States and abroad. The interviews reveal the broad scope of narratives of African American men and women who have made significant contributions to American life, history, and culture during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
Human Rights Studies Online This link opens in a new window
Provides access to primary and secondary materials (including 75,000 pages of text and 150 hours of video) on human rights issues in the 20th and early 21st centuries in Africa, Asia, Europe, United States, and Latin America. Subject coverage includes Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Darfur, Sierra Leone, and dirty wars in Latin America.
Internet Archive This link opens in a new window
Updated daily. A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts that exist in digital form. Includes texts, audio, moving images, software, and archived web pages. Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has archived over 150 billion web pages from 1996 to the current year.
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive This link opens in a new window
Curated by America's longest running dance festival, Jacob’s Pillow, this free resource includes dance clips from the festival spanning from the 1930s to today. Search by artist, genre, or era. The collection is constantly growing, and you can click SIGN UP to receive notice of all new videos.
Latin America in Video This link opens in a new window
Provides access to documentaries produced in Latin America, by some of the most important producers and independent filmmakers in Latin America. The documentaries cover Latin American issues, such as cultural identity, political history, human rights, popular culture, agribusiness, education, religion, and more. The collection’s materials are presented in their original language with abstracts and indexing in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
LGBT Studies in Video This link opens in a new window
This collection is a cinematic survey of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as well as the cultural and political evolution of the LGBT community. This first-of-its-kind collection features documentaries, interviews, archival footage, and select feature films exploring LGBT history, gay culture and subcultures, civil rights, marriage equality, LGBT families, AIDS, transgender issues, religious perspectives on homosexuality, and global comparative experiences.
Medici.tv This link opens in a new window
The world's leading classical music channel, medici.tv features over 1,800 programs and more than 100 live events broadcast each year. Content includes music festivals (such as the Verbier, Salzburg, and Lucerne), concerts from baroque through contemporary music (Berlin, New York Philharmonic orchestras, the Concertgebouw, Carnegie Hall recitals, etc.), operas (including Paris and La Scala), ballets, workshops and master classes with renowned artists (from Juilliard, Heidelberg, and elsewhere), competitions (the Tchaikovsky from Moscow), documentaries, artist portraits, and archived performances.
Meet the Press This link opens in a new window
Contains over 1,500 hours of footage of the full surviving broadcast run of network television's longest running program. Thousands of interviews, panels, and debates are available online in one cross-searchable interface.
Met Opera on Demand This link opens in a new window
Student Access offers University of Texas users instant access to more than 550 full-length Met performances, including stunning HD videos from the Met’s award-winning Live in HD series of movie theater transmissions, classic telecasts from the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, and hundreds of radio broadcasts dating back to 1935. The site and its content are fully accessible on most mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) directly through the website as well. All videos include English subtitles, and recent HD videos include subtitles in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and/or Swedish. New titles are added every month, with most of the Met’s Live in HD programs coming online a few months after their live transmission date. Every opera includes an English synopsis, with synopses in multiple languages available for many operas.
Music Online: Opera in Video This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly until completion. Scheduled to contain 250 of the most important opera performances, captured on video through staged productions, interviews, and documentaries. Selections represent the world’s best performers, conductors, and opera houses and are based on a work’s importance to the operatic canon. The collection presents an overview of the most commonly studied operas in music history, opera literature, and performance classes. Multiple performances and stagings worldwide of the major operas allow for analysis of stage design, vocal techniques, roles, and musical interpretation across time periods, opera houses, and conductors.
Performances will cover the full range of operatic composition, from the Baroque to the 20th century.
Specially developed controlled vocabularies let users browse by composer, genre, performer, ensemble, time period, and role.
North American Indian Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
A collection of biographical material of American Indians and Canadian First Peoples in their own words and through the words of others. Includes biographies, autobiographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, oral histories, reference works, manuscripts, photographs and audio files.Sources include rare books and biographies from more than 100 Indian publications, such as The Arrow, the Cherokee Phoenix, and the Chickasaw Intelligencer. The collection includes 2,000 oral histories presented in audio and transcript form and at least 20,000 photographs from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Edward Curtis, and many rare collections.
OnArchitecture This link opens in a new window
OnArchitecture is an online audiovisual service providing a synthetic, deep and detailed panorama of the world's main authors, works, experiences and problematics related to the field of architecture. OnArchitecture's collection features original videos, such as interviews, buildings and installations, all of this enriched with a selection of complementary material documents and audiovisuals about the main authors and figures of contemporary architecture.
OnTheBoards.TV This link opens in a new window
Works best on browsers other than Firefox
OntheBoards.tv is an on-demand website for HD-quality contemporary performance films. Launched in January 2010, this first-of-its-kind site brings contemporary work to a wider public by filming top caliber performances with multiple high-definition cameras, editing the film collaboratively with the artists, and delivering them online as feature-length performance films. Filmed at On the Boards, as well as peer theaters across the country, the performances present a snapshot of the best new works by current leaders in dance, theater and music. The films consist of compelling international and northwest contemporary performance including works by artists who are rarely seen in the US and works that will never be performed again.
PBS Video Collection: 4th Edition This link opens in a new window
Currently includes over 1,400 streaming videos, providing exceptional range of content with documentaries and series from PBS. Includes selected episodes from series such as Nova, Nature, Frontline, and American experience. New content will be added until September 2023.
Sherman Grinberg Film Library This link opens in a new window
The Sherman Grinberg Film Library, home of Paramount and American Pathe Historic Newsreel Collections, shares historic newsreel footage with students and faculty for research and class projects. The collection has a large range of news stories from 1897 - 1957 on a broad range of topics from the early 20th Century. The archive includes thoroughly indexed footage in the classic genres: Entertainment and Celebrities including the Oscars; Sports including the Olympics, college, and professional games; World Leaders and Politics; the Great Wars (WWI, WW2 and more); Science and Technology; Natural Disasters and Civil Unrest; Fashion, Culture, Crime, and Everyday Life.
Socialism on Film, Module 1: Wars & Revolutions This link opens in a new window
Sourced from the British Film Institute (BFI), this collection of documentary, newsreel and feature films from the ETV-Plato Films collection put together by the British communist Stanley Forman in the years after the Second World War - produced almost exclusively in the communist world and then versioned into English for distribution in the West.
Search across Adam Matthew primary source databases using AM Explorer
TeachingBooks This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly. Teachingbooks.net is a collection of multimedia materials about children's and young adult books, authors, and illustrators. The digital library offers tens of thousands of resources supporting books being read in the K–12 curriculum, including:
- Original video and audio productions with authors and illustrators, including interviews, book readings, video book trailers and other resources to infuse multimedia into literacy activities
- Links to author websites and blogs
- Ready-to-use, evaluated lesson plans and book discussion guides
- Lists of book award winners and nominees, including the Texas Bluebonnet Awards
Simply search by your book/author/illustrator or browse the collection by grade level, subject/genre or type of resource (interview, book reading, etc).
Theatre in Video This link opens in a new window
Contains streaming video of more than 250 of the world’s most important plays, together with more than 100 video documentaries. Also includes the full text of plays, their history of performance, production background, reference materials and ephemera. Users have the ability to bookmark specific scenes, monologues, and staging examples and then include those online links in papers and course reserves. The included plays are predominately 20th century masterpieces, as well as many Shakespeare productions.
Users may also make isolated clips from the videos and save them in a free account available for registration set up within the database.
Information on basic system requirements for both PC and Mac platforms is available on the site.

Contact information

Uri Kolodney

Email Me

Contact:

512-495-4399

Subjects: Audio/Visual, Hebrew Studies, Israel Studies, Jewish Studies, Radio-Television-Film, Yiddish