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November 13, 2020

More to watch: UW Libraries expands online resources during pandemic, emphasizing arts, equity

UW Libraries has made significant investments in electronic material to equitably support online learning, opening access to more than 250,000 new e-resources, including many to support the arts.

Students of drama, music, art, architecture and other fields will have greater access to research texts and media thanks to a recent expansion of online resources by University of Washington Libraries to help meet the needs of remote learning during COVID pandemic.

And the rest of the UW community gets a lot of cool stuff to watch along the way, from dramas to documentaries.

For now, the campus libraries are closed to in-person visits. But since spring, UW Libraries has made significant investments in electronic material to equitably support online learning, opening access to more than 250,000 new e-resources, including many to support the arts.

Chief among the new additions is Academic Video Online, a subscription service with more than 72,000 titles in a variety of subjects including anthropology, business, history, music, health and more, as well as documentaries.

Music researchers will have three times the access to the Classical Scores Library, with 53,000 titles and more than a million printable pages of the most important scores in classical music, as well as lesser-known contemporary works.

For drama researchers, access to the New Play Exchange was opened before the pandemic and is especially helpful now. This is a resource for finding contemporary works by living playwrights from underrepresented populations, and researchers can search for scripts based on the author’s racial, ethic and gender identity. New access has also been opened to 1,700 plays in the Drama Online Core Collection join existing online collections of classical and contemporary works.

Also, students and researchers in art, design, architecture, archaeology, museum studies, cinema studies and other fields will have expanded access to journals and other publications.

UW librarians chose the new online resources with an eye toward getting the most impact with limited funding. But they say there is more yet to be done to fully support long-term remote learning. The additions were made possible with significant support from many donors to the COVID-19 Emergency Needs Fund and endowments.

For more information, contact Sandy Hawley, UW Libraries communications director, at shawley1@uw.edu.