Library offers trial subscription to Kanopy film streaming service

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Library offers trial subscription to Kanopy film streaming service
The Mossey Library has a trial subscription to the Kanopy film streaming service, which includes movies from The Criterion Collection, as well as foreign films. Joel Meng | Collegian

Hillsdale College students can now access a collection of more than 30,000 movies on the video-streaming service Kanopy. The collection includes a wide variety of content including lectures from The Great Courses, Academy Award-winning movies like “Moonlight” or “Amy,” and many classic films and documentaries from across the decades

The college is testing the service with a trial which grants Hillsdale students access until Feb. 28, so interested students should check out the service before the trial expires.

LeAnne Rumler, technical services at librarian at Mossey Library, discovered the service last year at the Charleston Library Conference. After a previous library video-streaming service, FilmStruck, went out of business in October 2018, Rumler wanted to find another service with access to a quality suite of films.

“Kanopy has the Criterion Collection,” Rumler said. “The video-streaming company that we used to have that had Criterion went out of business.”

The Criterion collection has hundreds of high-quality films which includes “Seven Samurai,” “Miss Julie,” and “Under the Volcano.”

Besides Criterion, Kanopy has access to A24 Studio’s movie collection. The collection, which includes Academy Award winning films, also includes such films as “Swiss Army Man” with Daniel Radcliffe or “Room” with Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay.

“It seems like they’re a lot of movies you would maybe need to see for a class,” sophomore Caleb Lambrecht said. “I think it could serve a lot of great educational and simultaneously entertaining purposes.”

Hillsdale College’s streaming services come at a time when many students are eschewing physical copies of media.

“In general, students want the ease and convenience of streaming video rather than coming from the library, checking out a Blu-ray or DVD, which some people don’t have the players anymore to be able to watch,” Rumler said.

Senior Adam Cieply, secretary of the Film and Production Club, said a lot of libraries have subscribed to Kanopy, and having access to it at Hillsdale opens up a lot of opportunities.

“It gives you access to a lot of foreign films that you would otherwise not get,” Cieply said. “It gives students the opportunity to explore stuff, and a lot of language departments use film.”

Independently of Kanopy, students have access to video streaming services such as Films on Demand which features hundreds of documentaries and educational videos, Ambrose Videos which features many educational videos, including more than 30 BBC performances of Shakespeare plays, and Digital Theatre which has more than 900 performances of plays.

These services can be found by searching their names in the database search on the Mossey Library website.