News & Blog

This fall SGA partnered with UCF Libraries to locate and purchase eBooks to replace course textbooks. Here’s a snapshot of the impact.

We have a new series called Research Tips Thursdays. Each Thursday we will be posting quick videos that focus on building specific research skills to make the research process faster and easier for students. Students can sign up to be notified when new content posts!  

The current week’s videos will be highlighted here https://guides.ucf.edu/rtt, as well as on our Facebook and Twitter pages. You can find past episodes in our archives.  

Topics coming up:   

October:  

• Synthesizing Ideas from Multiple Sources  
• Is it Trustworthy? Election Edition  
• Using Advanced Search Options  

November:  

• Why We Cite  
• Following the Research Conversation  
• Identifying Research Gaps  

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)