Speaking to friends, family and from personal experience, it has become increasingly evident that, perhaps as a way to cope, our days are now being spent in the bottomless inertia of the internet. Alongside the multitude of mainstream media, Smith offers more off-kilter online options for helping students through this pandemic.
In addition to the electronic academic resources Smith College Libraries has released in response to Covid-19, such as information on how to e-research, explore the special collections, and access course reserves, there exists the library’s entertainment section.
Under the jurisdiction of First Years’ Experience and Engagement Librarian Cat Hannula, this page includes a directory for databases of film, theater, fashion magazines, artworks, application for learning a new language and even virtual tours of national parks.
With regard to movies, Smith students can stream top digital databases through the library. This includes Swank Digital Campus and Kanopy – streaming platforms with everything from major Hollywood films to avant-garde foreign indies. Films like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Casablanca,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Frankenstein,” “Ex Machina” and the entire Hunger Games series are amongst the more recognized titles of Swank. Kanopy is one of the largest collections available with categories like architecture, LGBTQ cinema, Indigenous studies, midwifery, zoology and experimental/alternative media.
Additionally, access to less popular sites such as Asian Film Online, Independent World Cinema and Theatre in Video is available. Distributed by Alexander Street, Asian Film online has an incredible arrangement of independent films and documentaries from Iran to Japan. These titles range from publishers like the Center for Asian American Media, Korea National University of Arts and Iranian Independent. This, in conjunction with the Independent World Cinema, ensures that any Smithie’s film repertoire will be unequivocally elevated.
And to assist in the film selection process, the Film and Media Studies faculty and students have created their own “Isolation Watch Picks.” Under each recommendation, faculty wrote a brief description and which streaming platforms to find their film under. In the students’ catalogue, other Smithies are encouraged to add their own picks to the collection.
Complementing the cinema selections are six other databases for music. Mostly filled with operatic and classical albums, these electronic libraries include the Smithsonian Global Sound, Met Opera on Demand and Naxos Music Library. The Naxos collection also includes categories of Contemporary Jazz, Film/TV music and Pop and Rock.
Music on these sites have been highly curated, so they have the unique ability to be carefully considered and analyzed. As WOZQ, Smith’s radio station, has temporarily shut down, these collections offer exposure to the alternative music students previously had.
Furthermore, if archival browsing is the preferred method of media intake, links to the Vogue Archives, Harper’s Bazaar Archives, ARTstor (two million images of art in a variety of subjects) and Underground and Independent Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels can be found under their respective tabs. As the Vogue collection reaches as far back as 1892 and Harper Bazaar to 1867, there is a plethora of retro/vintage fashion concepts to be explored or recreated in quarantine, as well as aesthetic criticisms from over the decades that provide fodder for thought.
And finally, with something reminiscent of virtual reality, Smith offers links to virtual tours of museums and national parks. Stretching across the globe, this includes the Guggenheim in New York to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico. If students want to explore outdoors at home, one click can lead them to traverse glaciers in Kenai Fjord National Park in Alaska and scale rock formation in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico.
The best and most direct resource, amongst all of these, would have to be the librarians themselves. Incredibly knowledgeable and ridiculously helpful, each librarian knows the ins and outs of these databases and sites. Reaching out to any one of these experts will open you to a myriad of knowledge, entertainment and fun.
