Library cardholders can take Great Courses

For lifelong learners who aren’t able to enroll in college, a new service offered by the Columbus Metropolitan Library might be an inexpensive solution.

The Great Courses lecture series is now available, along with more than 30,000 movies, to library cardholders via Kanopy, an on-demand streaming video service.

The lecture series has been available for years from Virginia-based The Learning Company, which screens elite or well-known college professors to help produce a series of half-hour lectures on topics such as physics in everyday life, multi-variable calculus, art or archaeology.

If purchased from the company’s website or mailorder catalogues, the cost of each series can range from $25 to more than $100.

“As the weather turns cold, we’d love to have more people take advantage of this,” said Greg Dodd, library marketing director. “It’s a great resource to curl up on the couch with and enjoy the winter months.”

The Kanopy application can be downloaded to smart phones, tablets and streaming devices such as AppleTV, Chromecast and Roku.

In addition to Great Courses, it has more than 30,000 films, from documentaries, film-festival selections and independent and classic offerings. Once logged in, library cardholders are not charged fees for the commercial-free films.

Some of the rare titles include: Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dementia 13,” A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” and “Two Days in Paris.”

As the library is in the final stages of a massive project to rebuild or refurbish 10 of its 23 branches, it is also aware that some customers prefer online titles.

“It really is about having something for everyone, to be able to offer this content from wherever you are in the world with your Columbus library card,” Dodd said.

“We’re striving to provide access to the way our customers want that access.”

Already, e-books and audiobooks are available online using Overdrive; music and mainstream movies, using Hoopla and dozens of magazines via Zinio. All are available from the library’s website: columbuslibrary.org. The library is spending about $1.3 million on digital services this year, less than 2 percent of its general fund budget.

Customers pay nothing, other than taxes through their library levy, which is about $86 a year for each $100,000 of property value if in Franklin County. And anyone in Ohio can get a card. The library pays the vendors $2 for each customer download.

Kanopy also is being used in more than 200 other U.S. public library systems.