Libraries around the world are going through an unprecedented moment in their evolution as educational institutions.
With the advance of online streaming and the public's predilection for audiovisual content, universities, colleges, schools and educational centers are focusing on equipping their libraries with advanced services for streaming curated documentaries online for better user accessibility to quality content.
It is becoming less and less common for our trusted librarian to hand us that DVD or Blu-ray disc that we would have picked from the boring and monochromatic index that traditional libraries have accustomed us to.
The new SVOD platforms have accustomed us to friendly and colorful menus. They provide us with hand-picked documentaries, movies and episodic series with attractive images, trailers, and well-written and catchy synopses.
Undoubtedly, this new home-cinema experience has made those intricate and monotonous online library sites of the past obsolete. As a result, a new alternative is emerging when it comes to offering educational documentaries online to users.
Following the passion for innovation that drives its entire team, Guidedoc, the most promising Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) platform exclusively for documentaries, has launched the first site dedicated to streaming documentary films for libraries around the world.
From anywhere in the world, library users subscribing to Guidedoc will be able to access a large and specially curated catalog of award-winning documentaries from the world's most important film festivals, of various genres and languages, whether they are short films, medium-length films or documentary feature films.
It's a fair question that every librarian should have in mind in this world full of technological innovations. But the answer is very simple.
With the overwhelming flood of digital content (documentaries, movies, series, viral content, video blogs and more) the selection and curation of this content are more necessary than ever.
Guidedoc is composed of a team of professionals and experts in the field of documentary filmmaking who watch and select dozens of non-fiction films on a daily basis to add a new title to the platform each day.
In addition, Guidedoc is a company known for investing at least 50% of its profits in technology. After five years in the market, the site has a solid streaming platform that can be watched on computers, tablets and cell phones simultaneously (iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android Tablets, Google TV, Apple TV, ChromeCast and Airplay).
By having the technological and intellectual benefits of Guidedoc, libraries can save time and money on technical maintenance and human resources to finding quality documentary films. It's a win-win decision.
The best way to get a glimpse into the experience of students, professors and library users with access to Guidedoc is to dig into the best educational documentaries from its specially curated catalog.
To do so, we have designed a list of the top 10 documentaries for libraries that you can watch online on Guidedoc.
In this musical documentary, four young Americans struggle to pursue careers in classical music while navigating high school. But in order to fulfill their dream, they must face doubts about whether this decision will affect their financial stability in the future.
Mixing a wilderness adventure with an environmental message, this film follows a group of courageous women conservationists as they take to the seas in search of the ancient Great White Shark Route in South Africa.
Moving to another continent, in this documentary a visionary teacher runs a pilot program for “schools of the future” in India. The experiment is based on mobile Internet access to rural schools in India where children can design their own educational experience.
Brief, irreverent, contemporary. This short film is a pocket-sized biography of the famous and revolutionary Norwegian painter Edward Munch, known for his famous painting "The Scream".
Premiered at the renowned International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, this documentary about disability is both an endearing and witty portrait of Carolina, a 20-year-old Uruguayan woman with Down syndrome.
This social documentary takes us to the antipodes of the world to show us how the poorest inhabitants of the margins of equidistant places like Mumbai and Quebec are building houses that can solve the current global housing crisis.
In Mozambique, Africa, a group of women who live in an orphanage tell us about the enriching experience that this educational space has had in their lives to overcome the immense social needs of their population.
After suffering what seems to be a serious episode of dissociation, a father abandons his family and starts a new life elsewhere. In this gripping family documentary, we follow a son trying to piece together the life of a father conditioned by mental illness and parental neglect.
Who said that we need a lot of money to create new technology? This short film follows a Central American girl called Rina and her experience with Bici-Tec, a pedal-powered technology applied to the reality of her small village in El Salvador.
Featuring interviews with award-winning filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, this documentary takes a look at the world of cinema and envisions the future of the so-called "seventh art".
Watch more great documentaries online on Guidedoc