Digital Resources for Film & Media Studies: Home

Welcome to the library research guide for digital resources related to film and media studies  Use the above tabs to find and engage with a variety of resources--including digitized documents, photographs, film, and video--in your research related to film, television, radio, and other performing arts.

This guide is a starting point for your research and the resources are not meant to be comprehensive. This guide will continue to grow and change as new resources are added.

Please help me improve this resource by providing feedback (ljtreat@ucsb.edu).

Calisphere  provides free access to unique and historically important artifacts for research, teaching, and curious exploration. Discover over one million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more. The collections on Calisphere have been digitized and contributed by all ten campuses of the University of California and other important libraries, archives, and museums throughout the state.

California Revealed is a State Library initiative to help California’s public libraries, in partnership with other local heritage groups, digitize, preserve, and provide online access to archival materials - books, newspapers, photographs, audiovisual recordings, and more - that tell the incredible stories of the Golden State. 

Digital Public Library of America makes millions of materials from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the country available to all in a one-stop discovery experience.

SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) is a free, online resource that helps users discover biographical and historical information about persons, families, and organizations that created or are documented in historical resources (primary source documents) and their connections to one another. Users can locate archival collections and related resources held at cultural heritage institutions around the world. Keep in mind that although SNAC is working to build a corpus of reliable descriptions of people, families, and organizations that link to and provide a contextual understanding of historical records it still only includes a small number of members which can be found here and shouldn't be your final stop.

Umbra Search African American History is a digital library and widget that aggregates materials documenting African American history and cultural life from archives, libraries, museums, and other US repositories. Umbra Search features thumbnail images and descriptive information about photographs, manuscripts, documents, books, sound files, video files, and other freely available resources.

Europeana works with thousands of European archives, libraries and museums to share cultural heritage for enjoyment, education and research. Europeana provides access to millions of books, music, artworks and more.

European Film Gateway access to hundreds of thousands of film historical documents as preserved in European film archives and cinémathèques: photos, posters, programmes, periodicals, censorship documents, rare feature and documentary films, newsreels and other materials

Film/AV Collections of FIAF Affiliates Online is a list featuring links to free online streaming services used by FIAF affiliates to provide convenient access to their audiovisual collections.

Find items held in the UCSB archives and manuscript collections, via the Online Archive of California.