Ellen Pham just alerted me to a neat site called American History In Video.

It has thousands of high-quality history videos, and provides transcripts to them. One great element of how they lay-out the transcripts is that they are on the side of the video and you can scroll them down. this design makes it actually usable to English Language Learners (closed-captioning is best of course, but I guess you can’t have everything). Some other sites, unfortunately, have the transcript below the video, which isn’t helpful for ELL’s because they can’t have the video and the transcript on the screen at the same time.

There are a lot of other excellent features on the site. It appears that they are developing a semantic search capability, and I think (but can’t be sure) that they plan that once you find what you’re searching for, you can only show that actual clip from the video. Everything is free until April 30th, and that’s when the not-so-excellent feature of needing to have a paid subscription kicks-in. You’ll also be able to get a free 30 day trial.

One thing that does seem a little strange to me, though, is that I couldn’t find-out how much they would be charging for a subscription — it only said to email them if you wanted one. Perhaps it’s there, though, and I was just looking in the wrong place.

If it was going to be free (or even if they were just going to charge a nominal feed),  I’d add the site to The Best Sites For News & History Videos That Won’t Be Blocked By Content Filter (At Least, Not By Ours!). But since they are going to charge, and I don’t have any idea what the cost will be, I won’t be including it there. But it’s still worth checking-out.