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VAST: Academic Video Online
“Recommended.” –CHOICE
VAST: Academic Video Online is Alexander Street’s flagship video subscription, delivering key video that touches on the undergraduate curriculum needs of virtually every department. VAST is growing to more than 20,000 full video titles (not just clips) in 2013 and currently offers well over 9,000 hours of content.
VAST is designed to bring the highest-quality video content to the broadest range of subject areas. Faculty and students will find content in VAST to meet their learning, teaching, and research interests in:
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Whether you need early 20th century newsreels for your history department, contemporaneous field recordings of previously undocumented cultures for anthropology coursework, or demonstrations of treatment and rehabilitation strategies for traumatic brain injury in the health sciences, you’ll find high-quality and relevant content quickly and easily.
Titles in VAST are carefully selected to meet departmental needs and include documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, field recordings, commercials, and raw footage. You’ll find thousands of award-winning films, including Academy® and Emmy® winners, the most frequently used films for classroom instruction, newly released films, and archival material previously unavailable.
Research Tools
- VAST is a powerful multidisciplinary tool for researchers seeking new insight into their subjects.
- Semantic facet browsing provides intelligent information that changes as users search, homing in on exactly what they’re looking for.
- Users can precisely narrow searches by a range of criteria, including content type, date published, author, person discussed, and more.
- In 2013, all VAST content will be available in Google Search.
- In 2013, VAST content will be available alongside relevant curated content sources from around the Web, yielding hundreds of thousands of additional videos all searchable together using VAST’s deep Semantic Indexing.
Library Tools
- Forthcoming VAST features will provide unprecedented levels of administrator support.
- Free in-depth MARC records are available for more than 80 percent of VAST, with new records added monthly.
- All content is fully integrated with Summon, EDS, Primo, and WorldCat.
- Librarians can access in-depth statistics compliant with COUNTER4 and SUSHI, monitor usage down to the specific title, and turn content and features on and off.
- Library usage stats will be able with 24-hour currency.
- A series of helpful instructional videos is available to support new users.
Teaching Tools
VAST has been curated with the undergraduate experience in mind. All content is selected by expert editors to match the typical core curriculum.
- Educators can choose and assign videos for class to watch with ease, and embed links and annotations directly into the syllabus or LibGuide.
- The platform allows seamless integration with any LMS, including Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai.
- A forthcoming suite of apps and an API provide users with tools to use the content in new ways—by making quizzes, maps, study guides, and timelines from content; adding text or telestration to videos; and more.
- “Clips for College” enhance coursework by delivering easy-to-find, short selections of key content on the most sought-after topics.
Learning and Sharing Tools
In 2013, VAST is expanding its platform of learning and sharing tools to give even more freedom to build, annotate, and share playlists of videos, clips, and other material.
- Users can view the entire VAST interface, including transcripts, in 65 languages.
- Discipline landing pages highlight editor-curated content and playlists.
- Users will be able to build customized learning objects, drawing on VAST materials and their own content, collaborating with other academics, and sharing these tools with the community.
- The platform helps users find learning objects created by ASP and the academic community across many disciplines.
- Students and scholars can export citations in a variety of formats, including Chicago, MLA, and APA.
- In 2013, content will be viewable and shareable through our new mobile app, ideal for smartphones and tablets.
| VAST: Academic Video Online | Leading Competitor’s Product | |
| Number of Titles | 17,000+ | 12,000 |
| Full-length Titles in Humanities and Social Sciences | 10,000+ | 6,000+ |
| Additional Subject-specific Video Collections Available | 20+ | 0 |
| Video Streaming Rates | Up to 2.5 mbps | Up to 1.5 mbps |
| Interactive Transcripts | 12,000+ titles | Transcripts where available |
| MARC Records | 81% of VAST titles indexed for up to 50 fields | Select MARC records where available |
| Browse/Search Capabilities | Semantic facet browsing | Standard subject browsing |
| Clipping Service | Yes | Not available |
| Apps and Learning Objects | Coming 2013! | Not available |
| Collaborative Academic Community | Share and collaborate on clips, playlists, and other content | Not available |
A sampling of the dozens of high-caliber content partners included in VAST
Product Information
VAST is available by subscription to academic libraries worldwide. No special setup or software is required—all you need is a Web browser. To request a free trial or price quote, or to learn about the thousands of additional titles available in ASP’s discipline-specific collections, please email sales [at] alexanderstreet [dot] com.
