Over the past several years, the Sound and Moving Image Library has purchased video streaming rights from different educational distributors and made these available to the York community for viewing from either on or off campus, but under these licensing agreements no downloading or excerpting has been permitted.

At last, one of these companies has heard and responded positively to the academic request for access to excerpts. We are pleased to announce that the Libraries have entered into a three year licensing agreement for online access to 64 titles from the collection of Films Media Group (www.films.com). Under this agreement, York users can view either the entire program or pre-selected “learning objects” (excerpts). But more importantly, faculty have the option of creating their own learning objects for classroom presentation and for viewing by their students.

This pilot project has been made possible by a $10,000 donation from the Atkinson School of Administrative Studies.  The video titles have been selected with input from their faculty members and so the content does have a business focus. However, there is material here of interest to other disciplines: topics covered include the sociological and economic impact of globalization, the “greening” of business, the integration of religion and corporate culture, product branding and advertising, and ethics and social responsibility.

To find a complete list of the 64 titles in the York catalogue, select the keyword search screen from the Libraries homepage, type FMG in the author line and highlight streaming video in the item type box. To watch a video (or excerpts), press the view button beside a title and highlight the URL at the bottom of the screen. The visual quality may remind you of YouTube but most importantly, the content has been determined by academic needs. If you would like to generate your own excerpts, let us know so that we can send you a password for the Films Media Group site.

Your feedback is important.  Films Media Group represents titles in many disciplines. If you find their streaming approach useful let us know and we will acquire similar rights from FMG for titles in other subject areas. Your comments would also be useful as leverage in persuading other educational distributors to change their minds on the excerpt issue. 

We look forward to hearing from you,

Sophie Bury, Business Librarian, Peter F. Bronfman Business Library (sbury@yorku.ca)
Kathryn Elder, Media Librarian, Sound and Moving Image Library (kelder@yorku.ca)