The initial phase of building the collection has been funded by contributions from the Library, the Education Department and the President'sOffice. The Houghton Mifflin Company and Prentice Hall have generously donated texts, series and teaching titles. Friends of the Library in particular are invited to visit the collection in the Clapp Library. 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.