British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

New entries on the Moving Image Gateway

The BUFVC Moving Image Gateway includes over 1,600 websites relating to video, multimedia and sound materials. These have been subdivided into over 40 subject areas. To suggest new entries or amendments, please contact us by email, telephone or visit the Gateway at http://bufvc.ac.uk/gateway/

Faculti
This site presents videos of academics from various disciplines, talking to camera about their interests and research. The aim is to communicate research in a way that is accessible to the wider public. The videos are professionally made and the participants present their ideas clearly in an unadorned, simple way, largely relying on direct, to camera communication, without any other audiovisual aids. Users can narrow their search by four broad categories: Arts and Humanities, Formal Sciences, Natural Sciences, Professional and Social Sciences. Amongst the disciplines currently represented on the site are Architecture, History, Philosophy, Sociology, Finance, Fashion, Film Studies, Management and Planetary Sciences. All content is free to view but there are various Licencing options for use of the content beyond the platform. A simple idea, well executed.

Heredity Podcast
Heredity is the official journal of the Genetics Society and this is its podcast. Produced intermittently since 2006 by researchers in the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences at Queen Mary University of London, each episode is usually around 20 minutes long and covers the latest research in human, animal and plant genetics. The episodes are accompanied by links which feature scholarly articles related to the subject matter of the podcasts. Suitable for undergraduates and postgraduates, subscription is free, either via iTunes or direct from the site itself via an RSS feed.

The History Vault
This history resource features a crisp, clean design and has a wide range of nicely-illustrated, easily searchable articles, reviews, podcasts, videos and interviews. Although it is aimed at a broad audience rather than a specifically academic one, there is much here that will interest teachers and researchers. Some of the content is directly concerned with pedagogy, such as this piece on history in the classroom which rehearses some of the recent arguments between politicians and academics on how history should be taught, and argues that teachers’ use of audiovisual materials in the classroom (such as Blackadder Goes Forth, in teaching the First World War) is more nuanced and critically engaged than the way it tends to be presented by politicians and in the mainstream press. Elsewhere Matthew Jones writes about UCL’s Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s project and among the site’s podcasts is a series on ‘Iconic Texts’, in which academics talk about documents which have had a profound historical impact, such as the Communist Manifesto, Thomas Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ and Mary Wolstonecraft’s ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’.

Library of Congress Webcasts
These webcasts consist of lectures and talks by experts, academics, researchers and archivist.  The Library of Congress has many different sites, collections and projects, covering a wide range of subjects: all are well-represented here and have been divided into eight broad subject areas: Biography, History, Performing Arts, Education, Government, Poetry and Literature, Religion and Science & Technology. Users can narrow their searches further within these broad headings, according to project/site/collection eg. The American Folklife Center, the Music Division, the Digital Future and You project, to name but three. The webcasts come with a brief description, date when uploaded and fully searchable transcripts. There is also a section for recently added webcasts. Although the talking head format is slightly old-fashioned the content is good and its searchability makes it a useful and user-friendly resource.

Planet Earth Online
The goal of this website is to explain how environmental scientists work and why the work they do is important. The site is run by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the UK public body that supports and funds the natural and environmental sciences, via major environmental research centres: the British Antarctic Survey, the British Geological Survey, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, the National Centre for Earth Observation and the National Oceanography Centre. As well as News and Features sections there is a Podcasts and Video page, where various aspects of the work done by the above bodies are discussed.

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