Read, Listen, Watch

September 16, 1956: Eleanor Roosevelt is seated at a table on the Meet the Press set in New York City. She is smiling at a man standing behind her. Host Ned Brooks is seated next to them.

Now, all of this history, much of which has been unseen since its original television broadcast, is just a few clicks away. Over the summer, Snell Library acquired access to the full surviving run of Meet the Press, from 1947 to today, through Alexander Street Press. That’s almost 1500 hours—or 62.5 days—of video available to you for free, dating back to 1957. You can watch Eleanor Roosevelt talk politics in the 1950s; see Martin Luther King, Jr. discuss the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s; hear Dan Rostenkowski describe Reaganomics in the 1980s; or watch Ross Perot’s presidential campaign unfold in the 1990s. Many episodes include detailed transcripts and closed captioning.

Meet the Press is available from our A-Z Databases list. You can also click here for direct access. If you are off campus, you may be asked to sign in with your NEU ID and password.

Summertime, and the viewing is easy…

a perfect time to catch up on movies and documentaries. When it’s too hot to sit outside with a good book, crank up the a.c. close the curtains, get out some snacks and hit play.

• Pick your format! Snell Library has excellent DVD and streaming video collections. See this year’s academy award winning films on DVD. Classics, contemporary films, and documentaries will expand your horizons.
• Locate videos by subject, keyword or title in Scholar OneSearch.
• This icon will appear beside a DVD, streaming videos will say “Online access”
• Use this streaming media guide to locate titles by vendor and subject. Our largest vendors are Academic Video Online Premium and Kanopy with a wealth of informative and entertaining choices.

Here are some recommended streaming media titles. Feel free to write me about your favorites.

Full-Length Features:

1. Au Revoir les Enfants- the story of friendship and loss between friends in Nazi-occupied France
2. Charlie Chaplin silent films – see a few!
3. Diabolique- a French murder tale–don’t miss this classic.
4. Reaching for the Moon – depicts the relationship between poet Elizabeth Bishop and architect Lota de Macedo Soares.
5. Stranger than Paradise– Jim Jarmusch’s transcendent adventures of a Hungarian émigré, his friend, and cousin.

Riveting Documentaries:

1. The Belle of Amherst –a 1976 theatrical performance of Emily Dickinson by Julie Harris. See Cynthia Nixon’s portrayal of Emily in the film “A Quiet Passion” playing in local theaters.
2. Grey Gardens– meet eccentric Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive cousins of Jackie Onassis.
3. Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble- be entertained by these international traveling musicians.
4. Notes on Blindness– a mesmerizing experience of John Hull’s experience becoming blind as an adult, and how he has adapted to a world without sight.
5. Photography Transformed:1960-1999– key photographers discusses photography’s effect on American life.

Hey science students!  We’ve subscribed to a new resource to help you with your lab courses.  Check out the JoVE Science Education Database to watch experts perform lab techniques before starting your own experiments.

Northeastern affiliates now have access to these collections:

• General Laboratory Techniques – including videos on centrifugation, microscopy, spectrophotometry, and pipetting

• Basic Methods in Cellular and Molecular Biology – including videos on plasmid purification, SDS-PAGE and DNA gels, Western blots, and PCR

• Essentials of Neuroscience – including videos on tissue staining, water mazes, patch clamp electrophysiology, fMRI, and neuroanatomy

Here’s a sample of the videos the JoVE Science Education Database has to offer:  Making Solutions in the Laboratory

We hope you find these video collections useful in your work.  Let us know what you think of them!

In the wake of the events that occurred on April 15, 2013 at the 117th Boston Marathon and on April 19, 2013 in Watertown, Northeastern University English Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Assistant Professor Ryan Cordell recognized the obvious need for a space where people could tell and share their stories with each other.  They believed that sharing stories from survivors, families, witnesses, visitors to the city, and everyone around the world touched by the event will speed the healing process, and wanted to create that space as a gift to the community.

Together, they established the Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, a crowd-sourced, digital archive of pictures, videos, stories, and social media related to the Boston Marathon bombing.  Thus far, they have acquired an archive of almost 10,000 items, 3 interactive exhibits, and 3 major collections.

[April 21, 2013, from the Public Submissions collection]

This summer, I contributed to this remarkable endeavor as a Simmons School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) graduate summer intern sponsored by the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections Department and supported by the Project Co-Director James McGrath. In addition to exhibit building and social media, the main task of my internship was to create lesson plans for schoolroom use.

Because children were affected by this crisis as well, the team at Our Marathon thought it would help the healing process for children to use the Our Marathon archives—to remember and share stories in the safety of their own classrooms.  Additionally, it can be difficult for teachers to navigate the complex questions young students ask and a resource like the digital archive can work as a great tool to facilitate age appropriate discussion.

To that end, I helped create a Teaching Resources page for Our Marathon. This page showcases five lesson plans for Kindergarten through Grade 12 that utilize Letters to the City of Boston and The Copley Square Memorial collections,  and the WBUR Oral History Project as the basis for a teaching unit. These lesson plans are designed to demonstrate mastery of grade and subject appropriate Common Core Standards.

Hopefully, these assignments will generate more student submissions to the archive as well as create a platform for an important dialogue amongst students and teachers. I look forward to reading about their experiences in the Our Marathon archives.

Exciting news! New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced recently that “more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works in the Museum’s world-renowned collection may be downloaded directly from the Museum’s website for non-commercial use—including in scholarly publications in any media—without permission from the Museum and without a fee. The number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis.”

The Met calls this initiative Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC). When searching their online image collection, look for the OASC icon, which designates images that are part of this initiative. These images may be used for non-commercial purposes, including school assignments, presentations, scholarly publishing, or personal projects. (Read more about the OASC policy in the FAQ.)

This decision by the Met follows a very welcome recent movement among galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (the so-called GLAM organizations) to make more of their digital image content freely available when possible. This benefits the organizations by increasing public awareness of and generating publicity for their collections. And of course it benefits all of us to have greater access to cultural content worldwide!

Here are some links to more such programs:

• The J. Paul Getty Trust’s Open Content Program (read about it here)
• The National Gallery of Art’s NGA Images (read about it here)
• Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum’s Rijksstudio (read about it here)

The initiative known as OpenGLAM, which is helping many museums to open up more of their content, has a longer list of these types of efforts on their website. You can learn more about OpenGLAM from their FAQ. And be sure to check out the amazing image collections listed above. Happy exploring!