ARL Film Festival 2016—The “ARLIES”

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Member Engagement and Outreach Committee hosted the first annual ARL Film Festival (the ARLIES) on Tuesday, April 26, 2016, at the joint meeting of ARL and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) in Vancouver, Canada. The film festival highlights and shares multimedia products developed by member institutions to increase knowledge and use of libraries, their spaces, services, collections, and expertise.

ARL and CARL members were invited to submit films of less than three minutes in the following categories: How-To/Instruction, Development/Fund-Raising, Collections-Focused, Publicity/Marketing, and Free-Form. Out of 57 entries, the committee chose 26 submissions to be viewed by members and guests on the evening of April 26. Association member representatives voted following the film viewing and the 10 award winners (see below) were announced during the Association Meeting on Wednesday, April 27.

View all the 2016 ARLIES submissions and descriptions of the 26 featured films.

2016 ARLIES Winners

Best of How-To Instruction: Texas A&M University

This instructional video on fair use was originally created as part of ARL’s Fair Use Week and Texas A&M is now using the video as a faculty tutorial. Metrics will include number of views after key milestones.

Best of Development/Fund-Raising Films: Cornell University

This video was created in partnership with students to help raise money through crowdfunding to refurbish and modernize the iconic A.D. White Library. The campaign surpassed its original goal of raising $15,000 within days, breaking a Cornell-wide record for crowdfunding. The effort ultimately raised $42,100 from 248 donors, matched one-to-one by Cornell University Library Administration, to make additional improvements to ensure that A.D. White remains an inspirational space for future generations of students.

Best of Collections-Focused Films: Harvard University

The Emily Dickinson manuscripts are a cherished part of Houghton Library’s collections and, while it is her poems and letters that are most often celebrated, librarians of Houghton Library have also long dwelled on the poet’s lesser known lines: “2 Butter. / 19 eggs. / 5 pounds Raisins.” The librarians gathered, in early November, to bake Dickinson’s manuscript recipe for black cake, from which these lines come. One day after what would have been Emily Dickinson’s 185th birthday, the bakers invited the Harvard library community to Houghton to preview their video of the cake baking and share in the black cake. For those who could not join the birthday party, the library posted the video of their cake baking. For a venture calculated to spread goodwill and show a joyful side of this sometimes imposing library, the librarians are pleased to have shared this video and experience so broadly. They plan to follow up on the success with another cake-baking video, this time featuring Eccles cake made from a manuscript in the Houghton collections and celebrating the important collector, Mary Hyde Eccles. To date, the Dickinson cake-baking video has received 4,188 views; it has been available, in a slightly longer form, on the library’s blog and website and on YouTube.

Best of Publicity/Marketing Films: Southern Illinois University Carbondale

“Introduction to Morris Library” is a whiteboard video that was created as an entertaining promotional video to be shown during freshman orientation. The video has subsequently been used in all introductory freshman library instruction sessions. The number of views after a single semester exceeded the library’s expectations, and library staff were elated by the positive response from students and instructors alike. Based on the results, the library produced a series of videos for use by its first-year instruction partners to supplement their library instruction sessions. “Introduction to Morris Library” has recently undergone heavy revision—this link points to the most recent version.

Best of Free-Form Films: Brigham Young University

Two lyrical leviathans battle it out, armed with nothing more than their favorite audiobooks. The Harold B. Lee Library was looking for a creative way to highlight some of its resources and landed on audiobooks, which it hadn’t promoted before. The video was released in the fall of 2015.

Best Original Script: Brigham Young University

Best Performance: University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The film, “Information Is Our Game: Librarians Being Awesome,” grew out of a series of sports-themed marketing collateral the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Libraries created over the past two years, using a series of “trading cards” (like baseball cards) with a simple message: there is a designated librarian with subject expertise in your field of study. The trading cards were followed by several whimsical videos depicting librarians pitted against top-notch athletes. The videos were publicized via campus e-mail lists to students and to faculty, and were used as “bumpers” (brief ads that run before the main feature) on the campus’s free movie-streaming channel. The libraries also compiled film clips of some of their athletically gifted faculty and staff for a capstone video to the “Information Is Our Game” marketing campaign. This video has been featured on the libraries’ homepage and has been used as a bumper on their free movie-streaming channel, where it was viewed nearly 3,000 times during January and February. The video has received almost 1,000 views on YouTube.

Best Production: University of Southern California

A co-production of the University of Southern California (USC) Libraries and public television station KCET, LOST LA is a new TV series that brings Southern California history to life by marrying archival materials with innovative forms of documentary storytelling. This submission is an excerpt of the segment “California’s Lost Grizzly,” directed by Laura Purdy. This episode was widely viewed on the night of its first airing (January 27, 2016) with a .3 rating in its premiere broadcast, which translated into 16,000 gross households. KCET has rebroadcast this episode of LOST LA several times on both its local broadcast channel and on its national satellite channel, Link TV. The libraries estimate that, including rebroadcasts and online streaming, more than 200,000 households have viewed this episode.