A post by Faculty Librarian Ben Taylorson

I’ve worked for Durham University Library and Collections for many years (since the last millennium in fact, for those that are counting) and one of the more difficult requests to fulfill in terms of resource provision has always been documentaries.

In the olden days (read: pre-internet, or internet as we know it today, at least) it was a matter of acquiring a hard copy on VHS and then latterly DVD. Documentaries released for educational purchase were usually considerably more expensive to buy in hard copy when compared to, say, mainstream movies released in the same format. This was, presumably, as the producers knew or expected a copy sold to an educational institution would be screened to a large cohort of students, thus the cost of one copy needed to reflect that.