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Public Television
- American Archive of Public Broadcasting
The Library of Congress and WGBH in Boston have embarked on a project to preserve for posterity the most significant public television and radio programs of the past 60 years: The American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The collection of 40,000 hours contains thousands of high quality programs that have had national impact. The vast majority of this initial American Archive content, however, consists of regional and local programs that document American communities during the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. This extraordinary collection includes local news and public affairs programs, local history productions that document the heritage of local communities, and programs dealing with education, environmental issues, music, art, literature, dance, poetry, religion, and even filmmaking on a local level.
- American Experience from PBS
Browse the entire PBS American Experience series featuring over 250 films. Watch full films online, download teacher’s guides, go behind the scenes, and learn more about your favorite films.
- Frontline from PBS
Described by The Atlantic as “the best news program on television,” the series has built a reputation for powerful investigative storytelling that tackles the tough, controversial and complex stories that shape our times. More than 180 FRONTLINE documentaries are streaming in full online.
- The Mike Wallace Interview
In the early 1960’s, broadcast journalist Mike Wallace donated 65 recorded interviews made in 1957-58 from his show The Mike Wallace Interview to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. The bulk of these were 16mm kinescope film recordings, some of the earliest recordings of live television that were possible, and that survive today. Many of these have not been seen for over 50 years, and they represent a unique window into a turbulent time of American, and world history. From Senators to strippers, Ku Klux Klansmen to Nobel Prize winners, Mike Wallace has interviewed them all.
- PBS POV
POV (a cinema term for "point of view") is television's longest-running showcase for independent non-fiction films. POV premieres 14-16 of the best, boldest and most innovative programs every year on PBS. Since 1988, POV has presented over 400 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. This site provides many full length films, as well as interviews with filmmakers and clips for use in the classroom setting.
- WGBH OpenVault
Provides online access to unique and historically important content produced by the public television and radio station WGBH. The ever-expanding site contains video, audio, images, searchable transcripts, and resource management tools, all of which are available for individual and classroom learning
Academic Resources
- American Indian Film Gallery
The AIFG presently contains over 450 non-fiction films that document Native lifeways from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, with a large concentration on peoples of the Southwest. The films range from a 1922 silent newsreel to recent footage of pow-wows and political meetings in 2011. The majority of the films date to the golden age of U.S. educational and sponsored filmmaking, after World War II up to the advent of portable video. Interestingly, the video age marks a shift in the collection from films about Native peoples to films by Native peoples. This historical span, then, allows for study of Native representation from outside and inside indigenous communities across the Americas over nearly a century. As such, it is an incomparable teaching and research tool for examining historical attitudes, representations, and understandings of indigenous populations across the Americas.
- Civil Rights Digital Library
The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. The CRDL provides educator resources and contextual materials, including Freedom on Film, relating instructive stories and discussion questions from the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, delivering engaging online articles and multimedia.
- EVIA Digital Library
The EVIA Digital Archive Project is a collaborative endeavor to create a digital archive of ethnographic field video for use by scholars and instructors. Funded since 2001 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with significant contributions from Indiana University and the University of Michigan, the Project has been developed through the joint efforts of ethnographic scholars, archivists, librarians, technologists, and legal experts. Beyond the primary mission of digitally preserving ethnographic field video, the EVIA Project has also invested significantly in the creation of software and systems for the annotation, discovery, playback, peer review, and scholarly publication of video and accompanying descriptions.
- Folkstreams
Folkstreams mission is to build a national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures, and to give those films renewed life by streaming them on the internet. The films were produced by independent filmmakers in a golden age that began in the 1960s and was made possible by the development first of portable cameras and then capacity for synch sound. Their films focus on the culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different regions and communities. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an institutional partner.
- HippoCampus
HippoCampus.org is a free, academic web site that delivers rich multimedia content--videos, animations, and simulations--on general education subjects to middle-school and high-school teachers and college professors, and their students, free of charge. Teachers project HippoCampus content during classroom learning and assign it for computer labs and homework. Students use the site in the evenings for study and exam prep.
- University Videos
Video library that curates freely available academic videos and the metadata from numerous universities' YouTube channels, as well as other informational sources such as TED talks, scientific and cultural institutions such as NASA and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, hospitals, research institutions, and broadcast archives such as Nova, the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. Includes searchable transcripts.
Other
- American Memory Moving Image Collections
From the Library of Congress collections, several hundred early motion pictures are viewable in the American Memory project.
- American Rhetoric
Database of and index to 5000+ full text, audio and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events, and a declaration or two. Not all speeches have accompanying videos. Site supported by advertising, and maintained by a speech communication professor.
- National Film Registry
The National Film Registry is a list of movies deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" that are earmarked for preservation by the Library of Congress. A selection of films from The National Film Registry are available online for free.
- TED Talks
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). 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.
