Email libmediaInternet Multimedia Search Engines
Indiana University Libraries Online Database Resources, and Affiliates:
Annals of American History/Encyclopedia Britannica
The Encyclopedia Britannica Video & Media database has a small, but growing collection of multimedia resources.
Black Film Center/Archive
The Black Film Center/Archive has early archival footage of African American stereotypes at the turn of the century. Select "Early Black Images, 1890s-1900s" from the left-hand column. More archival footage is available at the Library of Congress American Memory Collection.
Classical Music Library
The database contains over 30,000 classical music recordings for streaming to library and personal workstations. Users can easily search, browse, and listen to recordings, link to program notes, biographies, and images.
Digital Library Program Collections
- Hoagy Carmichael Collection
- Variations Project
The Digital Library Program has several collections that contain multimedia resources, most notably audio recordings.
Opera in Video contains 250 of the most important opera performances, captured on video through staged productions, interviews, and documentaries
Available are news transcripts from the 1960s to the present, and online video for CNN news broadcasts from 1999 to the present as indicated by the camera logo.
Theatre in Video contains more than 250 definitive performances of the world's leading plays, together with more than 100 film documentaries, online in streaming video - more than 500 hours in all.
Internet Resources
AOL Video
This search engine has recently been redesigned and has some nice extras like the ability to save searches and category based limits. The results screen is nicely laid out and shows the length of the video and the file format.
Blinkx.tv
This is a very interesting project that claims to search TV content not just by keyword, but also by analysis of the video content looking for conceptual matches. The content searched is relatively small compared to major search engines like Google, but it seems to have a good selection of news content.
C-Span Search
C-SPAN content is easy to search from their video search site. There is a simple one-box search and an advanced search screen that allows for limiting by date, as well as by category, topic, and series.
Digital Librarian: Audio, Video, Multimedia
This free resource provides an index to hundreds of free audio, sheet music, video and multimedia websites.
Excite UK - Video
This search engine is owned by the European branch of the Excite Network, giving it an international flavor. It searches a small number of video files compared to the bigger sites, but you may find clips here that are not indexed on the others.
This site serves as an index to multiple WAV sound files for commercials, cinema, TV, and sound effects. Includes a link to the very popular and in high-demand site, A1 Free Sound Effects, a fun resource with over 700 free WAV sound effects that include everything from breaking glass to creaking doors to sirens.
Google Video enables users to search a growing archive of televised content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows. The site is currently in its testing phase, so only a limited number of channels have been indexed since December 2004.
Hulu.com is a free online video service that offers hit TV shows including Family Guy, 30 Rock, and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, etc.
Indymedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth. The site can be translated into eight languages and includes both video and audio clips, as well as journalistic articles.
The purpose of the IMA is to offer permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996, the site includes texts, audio, moving images, software, as well as archived web pages. One of the main highlight of the IMA is access to the Prelinger Film archive, currently acquired by the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound division.
Library of Congress: American Memory Viewer
The American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. The collection contains over 10 million items, and the archival footage dates back to the late 1800s.
MSN Video Search
MSN video search offers content from MSNBC, The Today Show, Dateline NBC, and Meet the Press. The interface is a bit clunky, but worth a try to find news content.
This resource uses scholarship, interviews, archival recordings, music and narration to explore a range of humanities topics. It provides access to audio files and transcript supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Online News Hour
This site is for PBS fans. Here you can search the News Hour shows back to 2000. This site is easy to use and full of great content.
This is a unique web resource for users interested in capturing early sound bites from radio shows in the 1940s through the 1960s. It is dubbed as a source “for the history of nostalgic and old time radio series and news!”
Yahoo Video Search
The Yahoo video search screen is very “Google like,” clean and simple. The advanced search option provides plenty of limits. It is the only video search engine of the bunch listed here that provides a limit by domain (.com, .edu, .org, .gov, etc.). When you click on a site from the results screen, a split screen is displayed, similar to Google’s image search, allowing you to go directly to the video or the webpage that the video was found on.
Founded in February 2005, YouTube is the world's most popular online video community, allowing millions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.
Practical and Legal Considerations
Once you find a link to a video clip, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, not all files can be copied to your PC. Some files can only be viewed using video steaming. The advantage here is that the video is downloaded in small fragments allowing users with slower Internet connections to view media files, which can be quite large. However, streaming files often prohibit the content from being copied locally. Common streaming files format are Windows Media and Real Media.
Still, many files can be downloaded to your PC. Many of the search engines will indicate on the results screen which files can be fully downloaded or just viewed. But, there is another concern here: copyright.
Just because you can download a video does not always mean you have the right to use the clip in its entirety or in anyway you want. It is best to check with the copyright owner if possible before using a video clip. For educators, researchers, and students, copyright law does provide some flexibility when it comes to using media for scholarly purposes.
Guidelines that can help you decide if you can use a clip for a particular purpose are available online. Here are some useful sites to consult:
American Library Association: Distance Education and the Teach Act
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
University of Maryland University College
University of Texas Crash Course in Copyright
United States Code. Title 17-Copyrights. Legal Information Institute
Indiana University Libraries Copyright & Fair Use
Compiled by Bob Scheier and Emily Alling, Babson Library, Springfield College, Springfield, MA, Monique Threatt, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
