News & Blog

Streaming videos are a great way to add engaging content to online courses in a broad range of fields beyond film studies. Everyone from Sociology and LGTBQIA+ Studies to Environmental Studies and Mental Health Counseling can benefit.

Swank Digital Campus offers many popular films and current releases as well as HBO documentaries and TV series for use in online courses. UCF currently has 364 Swank films licensed for use including recent releases like Just Mercy (2019), Bombshell (2019), and The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) to classics such as Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Greed (1924). Links for these films can be sent the same business day as the request.

If none of those great films fits your course, you can search the full Swank catalog for specific films or browse by discipline. If you see anything you like, submit a request through the form on our guide.

And to help with your searching the list of currently licensed films is now sortable by title, year, or expiration date. Primary category will be added to the sorting options soon.

Struggling to find the right words? This week’s Research Tip Thursday gives you quick tips on how to get the most out of subject terms when you are at a loss for words!

Find this tip and more at guides.ucf.edu/rtt

“HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.” 

UCF is providing temporary online access to many HathiTrust digitized books which are owned in print by our UCF Libraries and for which the digitized copies are normally blocked because they fall within the period restricted by copyright. 

“Temporary Access” books:  

• Current UCF students, staff & faculty. 
• Login with NID after connecting 
• Can be read ONLY online  
• Check out for 1 hour (access will renew automatically at the end of that hour, unless another user requests the book) 

Looking for a quick and easy technique to help you incorporate supporting evidence in your writing? Check out this week’s Research Tip Thursday video! You will find a simple strategy that you can use to keep track of evidence as you go and quickly identify gaps that need filled.

Find this video and more at guides.ucf.edu/rtt

One way that faculty can help reduce the cost of a college education and positively impact student academic performance is to remove the barrier of high cost, commercially produced textbooks. There are several options for faculty to support textbook affordability efforts.

• See if the library can offer your textbook as an electronic book. The library will check for eBook candidates that allow unlimited users and offer favorable digital rights management (DRM). Contact your Subject or Campus Librarian for more information.
• Join faculty who have adopted an open textbook. Open textbooks allow anyone to read, copy, distribute, or modify the course content at no cost.
• Donate a copy of your print textbook to the library. Contact your Subject or Campus Librarian to donate currently assigned textbooks to the library.
• Work with the bookstore! Submit your assigned course textbook(s) on time to allow students to shop the cost of course materials and the bookstore to locate used and rental textbooks.

To date, UCF faculty have taught over 500 classes using open or library-sourced materials, in turn reaching almost 35,000 students and potentially saving them just over $3,200,000.* *Savings are calculated as cost of a new book by number of course enrollments as of Spring 2020.

For more information: library.ucf.edu/textbook-affordability