Website of the Week

Open Culture (www.openculture.com) is a great resource for anybody who likes free "stuff."

The About Us page says that Open Culture is “high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community.” It was started by a director and Associate Dean of Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program and others. They collected hundreds of links from the web that offers free resources. These resources are audio books, online courses, movies, language lessons, ebooks or textbooks.

The organization of the site also provides us with a list of the “Essentials” which are additional topics of films and videos. For easy browsing, there is a “Categories” list and also a search box for the Archives, which are blog entries.

For me that most interesting part of this website was the movies section. The site gathered about 500 free movies which are searchable or one can browse the list. Most of the movies on the list are made before the 1960s, short films or European films with subtitles; however, there is a large selection of horror movies, Westerns, silent films, documentaries and animation, as well.

Here are some great titles:

• The Blue Angel – Free – The Weimar classic that made Marlene Dietrich an international star. (1930)
• The Dead - Free – James Joyce’s brilliant short story adapted by John Huston, his last film. (1981)
• The Little Shop of Horrors – Free – Directed by Roger Corman with Jack Nicholson. (1960)
• Visioneers - Free - A dark comedy directed by Jared Drake, starring comedian Zach Galifianakis and Judy Greer. (2008)

And although the movies are mainly for entertainment, the free courses, language lessons, great science videos and the life changing books list, among others can be a great resource for both students and instructors.

Review by Erika Prange, SWC Librarian