The Library's video collection now contains close to 2000 titles on video cassette and laserdisk. Cultivating this collection from less than a hundred titles in 1992 to its current size has been the Library's response to faculty demand for video materials for teaching and research. Video is a very heavily used resource for instruction in a wide variety of disciplines. Students of foreign languages view films produced in France, Italy, Germany, Japan, China, and Russia for exercise in listening comprehension. The Library has purchased a small selection of films without subtitles for this purpose.
Foreign films are primary sources for historians, sociologists, and anthropologists.
Using French films from the 30s to the present, Gillain's course studies the changing images of women in French cinema. Both the fictional construction of female characters by the director and the stars who portray women in film are analyzed. In psychology and sociology, social science film is used extensively in a variety of courses both as an object of study and to instruct. Films documenting human behavior are used to study language acquisition, personality disorders, and human development. Similar courses with a somewhat broader perspective, taught by Associate Professor Tom Cushman, Sociology, include the topics of propaganda, persuasion, and the subliminal messages of film and media.