FindSounds is a free site where you can search the Web for sound effects and musical instrument samples.

There are eight films by Werner Herzog now available on YouTube, in their entirety. This is thanks to the video distributor Starzmedia, one of the companies participating in YouTube’s growing efforts to stream full-length films with the support of the movie companies who own the rights. The films available are Little Dieter needs to fly, My best friend, Aguirre the wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Lessons of darkness, Woyzeck, Even dwarfs started small, and The enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

Read more about Werner Herzog at Senses of Cinema.

Smarthistory is described as an “online art history textbook” and is presented in the form of an interactive timeline. Intended as an alternative to the traditional static Western art history textbook, the aim of the website is to expand the understanding of works of art through recorded conversations, which can be located on the website in the form of podcasts, Flash-based videos, and images. The material is accessible by ‘time’, ‘style’, ‘artist’ or ‘theme’.

Established in 2005 as a blog, Smarthistory is edited by Dr Beth Harris, who is currently Director of Digital Learning at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and Dr Steven Zucker, who is a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century art and theory, and dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, part of the State University of New York.

UCL has a trial of Theatre in Video until 26 April 2009.

This resource contains more than 100 definitive performances of the world’s leading plays, together with more than 60 film documentaries, in streaming video.  Included are the BBC complete works of Shakespeare, as well as works by Ibsen, Beckett, Pinter and many others. Productions can be searched, or browsed by person, genre, company etc. Users can bookmark specific scenes, monologues and staging.

Please send any feedback to me at e.lawes@ucl.ac.uk

The website for the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has provided this collection of over 300 video excerpts featuring painters, sculptors, installation artists and photographers, from feature length documentaries produced for their television series Art: 21 – Art in the 21st Century. The videos have been formatted for the Web and are available in both high and low bandwidth versions for RealPlayer, QuickTime and Windows Media Player. Arranged alphabetically each section includes short videos, a biography and slideshows of the artist at work, a survey of their work, interviews and links. Around 70 artists are featured, including Matthew Barney, Cai Guo-Qiang, Mark Dion, Ellen Gallagher, Roni Horn, Pierre Huyghe, Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman, Gabriel Orozco, Kara Walker, and Andrea Zittel.

The Wellcome Film collection has now been added to Film & Sound Online. The 212 films in the collection, which illustrate the use of film as a communication tool in the medical sciences, were previously only available to researchers visiting the Wellcome Institute.

The earliest footage is of archaeological digs in the Sudan, at Jebel Moya, featuring the founder, Sir Henry Wellcome himself (A day at Gebel Moya, season 1912-13), as well as more jaunty corporate fare about the business of running a pharmaceutical company (Looking Around, The Story of the Wellcome Foundation).

Many of the films were originally made for professional audiences such as doctors, surgeons, nurses and students of medicine, so be prepared for some “hands-on” footage of clinical procedures and actual operations.

Public information films from 1945-2006 are now available to view online at the National Archives website. Joining with the Central Office of Information (COI) to celebrate their 60th Anniversary, the National Archives have featured a selection of some of the most memorable and influential COI public information films that cover some fasinating events from Britain’s post-war history. The collection is particularly strong in coverage of films from the 1970s, including the famous ‘Charley Says’ and ‘Green Cross Code’ campaigns.

The Poetry Tool is a poetry search and browse engine built by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation.  Poets or poems can be browsed by name, dates, category, title, first line, glossary term etc. Audio files of some poems and videos of poets reading their work are also included, as well as articles from the archive of Poetry magazine.

The Poetry Foundation website also includes an extensive audio section which hosts, among other things, the Avant-Garde All The Time podcast in which poet Kenneth Goldsmith presents selections from Ubuweb.

SnagFilms is an online library of 550 full length documentaries, directed by a range of filmmakers from established directors to first time filmmakers. Films can be watched, or ‘snagged’ (by means of a widget) and put on any website to be watched for free. The library includes films from the Public Broadcasting Service, Arts Alliance America and National Geographic among others. The documentary list can be browsed by topic such as environment, health, history, politics, or by title.

Francis Alÿs: When faith moves mountains: a 15 minute film from 2002 when 500 volunteers formed a line in order to move a sand dune situated in the surroundings of the city of Lima. 

Focus on Vito Acconci: A poet of the New York school in the early- and mid-1960s, Vito Acconci (b. 1940) moved toward performance, sound, and video work by the end of the decade. Features a number of Acconci’s works, across several mediums, focusing mainly on his 1970s output.

Douglas Huebler: Variable piece 4 New York City: Secrets: PDF of a text from 1973. Also Audio works and radio interviews, 1977-78.

Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt: Mono Lake: 1968-2004, 19.54 mins. Featuring Super 8 film footage and Instamatic slide images of artists Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Nancy Holt as they visited California’s Mono Lake in July of 1968, this piece was edited by Holt in 2004.

UbuWeb Podcast 7: Punk Versions of Monkey Chants and Other Ethnopoetic Marvels: ‘Jerome Rothenberg-curated trove of ethnopoetic treasures, focusing on sound’.