Alexander Street Press' Critical Video Editions combine extensive collections of video with a powerful suite of searching, video clipping and sharing tools specially designed for teachers and researchers.

The collections include famous and rare video from the performing arts as well as the complete series of both United News and Universal Newsreel and a wide range of other archival and current film. Offerings available through the Columbia Libraries online database collection include (links below are available to Columbia affiliates only):

• American History in Video
• Theatre in Video
• Dance in Video
• Opera in Video
• Counseling and Therapy in Video

To build Critical Video Editions, Alexander Street has partnered with dozens of publishers and broadcast companies such as the BBC, A&E Networks, PBS, Creative Arts Television, ArtHaus Musik, Pennebaker, Hegedus Films, Cunningham Dance Foundation, and Insight Media.

Sample video from the Opera in Video collection:

The unique features of these products include synchronized, searchable transcripts, video clip-making tools, permanent URLs that allow users to cite and share clips, an embeddable video player that lets instructors deliver video content to other users via course websites, and playlists that can incorporate links to outside clips and text so they can be aligned with syllabi. The collection's powerful search and browse tools are driven by Alexander Street's trademarked Semantic Indexing, which uses controlled vocabularies and combinable search fields. Columbia users can access these resources by selecting Databases from the Libraries' E-Resources menu or by using the Quick Search feature on the Libraries' home page and entering the name of the edition.