Free to Air TV broadcasts

As you may be aware the University Library initiated a service last year to record and copy to DVD a range of free-to-air television broadcasts. These recordings were made under the terms of our Screenrights copyright licence and housed in the St Teresa's Library. This has proved to be a very popular service with staff and students and it is clear that there is a growing demand for AV materials to enrich teaching and learning.

We are pleased to be able to tell you that we have replaced this recording service with a more sophisticated delivery of this content. The replacement service is called TV News and is housed within the Informit database environment. This provides a number of advantages over the existing system:

• The content can be viewed via the web on and off campus and at all of our locations
• the content can be embedded within Powerpoint presentations
  
• The content can be saved to a hard drive, memory stick or DVD for use in the future
• You can use URLs to direct people to the content you want them to watch.

The service provides us with access to a far greater range of programmes than we have copied to date. A full range of titles can be seen here . The service captures the nightly news services and breaks these into items. Coverage is from September 2007 onwards but the plans are to increase the range of content captured.

The conditions of use are:

• You must be using the content for educational purposes
• Access to this content is restricted to University of Notre Dame staff and students
• Content cannot be re-published outside of the University, offered to non-students or on-sold in any way
  
• Use of the content must be accompanied by the Copyright Part VA Warning Notice.
  

The content is streamed so it is more effective and cheaper to save an item you are likely to use again rather than stream it each time you need it.

The Library will continue to record programmes that we have been asked to record and which are not included in TV News. At present the only two such titles are:

• Hot Docs (SBS Tues 10.00pm)
• Inside Australia (SBS Weds 8.00 pm)

The Library will also continue to accept requests from staff wanting us to record content which is not captured and indexed in TV News. Staff can place a request via this webpage

While you are visiting the Informit database I would encourage you to review the range of other services we have available through this publisher. This is the only Australian database provider and they provide access to a wide range of full text titles, both journals and e-books, as well as definitive Australia indexes in key disciplines.