With the exploding popularity of new technologies, schools and libraries are using ever more audio-visual (A-V) resources.  Audio-visual items can include movies or documentaries in formats such as video, DVD, audiotapes, books on tape, or softwares.  Just like books and articles, not all A-V resources are equal.  Using common sense and some of the tools available in the library, students can evaluate the quality of many A-V items.  When evaluating these items, consider relevance, currency, author's credentials, content, and bibliography.  While finding the answers to each of these questions might not be feasible for every A-V item, much of this information can be found in the library.  

One particularly popular type of A-V material is movies.  Movies are easy to watch, can be visually exciting, and are popular.  Of course movies often twist facts and make events seem different than they were.  Fortunately many authors, such as Ebert and Roeper, evaluate many movies as they are released.  Many of these reviews are easy to find in the library.  The online databases provided by InfoTrac and Ebsco are filled with movie reviews that were published in such national periodicals as Variety, Time, Newsweek, or The Rolling Stone.  Use the database’s search box to look for the movie reviews.  Simply type in the title of the movie, and then hit “Search.”  Please be aware that this will find reviews of recent movies, but few reviews will be found for earlier movies.  Most databases contain articles only back to 1989 or 1990, so movies released before then are not likely to be reviewed in these databases.  Even really famous films like Gone With the Wind or Citizen Kane might be discussed or criticized in articles today, but the reviews for these movies were written when the movies were first released. 

Movie reviews for older movies can be found using a number of resources available in the library. 

• Short paragraph-length reviews can be found in the Video Source Book (REF PN1992.95 V53 1995).  The reviews found in this work include quality ratings (with one star as the worst rating, five stars the best), lists of the cast and directors, and lists of any awards the movie received.  This is an especially useful first step, but the reviews found in this work are too short to be considered complete.
  
  

• Some of the more important or “classic” movies get discussed in the Contemporary Literary Criticism or Twentieth Century Literary Criticism volumes.  For instructions in using these series, please look at the Specialized Reviews: Literary Criticisms section of this Pathfinder.  When looking for movie reviews in these series, look for the title of the movie with the name of the director or screenwriter in parenthesis following the title.  For example, “Moby Dick (Melville)” indicates a criticism of the novel written by Herman Melville; “Moby Dick (Huston),” on the other hand, indicates a criticism of the movie adaptation of this novel that was directed by John Huston. 

• Movie reviews can also be found using the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.  The Reader’s Guide lists movie reviews under the subject heading “Motion Picture Reviews.”  To find these, go to the volume of the Reader’s Guide appropriate to the year the movie was released, then look for the subject “Motion Picture Reviews.”  The movies will be listed by title, and under each title will be a list of citations for the reviews that were written.  Check in the Henderson Community College Hartfield Library Magazine Directory to see if the necessary periodical is available, and retrieve the periodical to read the review.  For a more thorough discussion of the Reader’s Guide, look in the Using the Reader’s Guide section of the Pathfinder I.  Back issues of the Reader’s Guide dating from 1960 are located at the end of the periodical shelves on the library’s second floor.

In addition to movies, many other audio-visual products are reviewed.  Documentaries, book-on-tape renditions of books, and new softwares are often reviewed in national magazines.  These evaluations or reviews can be found using electronic databases such as InfoTrac’s Expanded Academic ASAP or Ebsco’s Academic Search Premier.