East Asian Studies
This guide provides a general introduction to library and information resources for all those studying, teaching and researching on topics relating to China, Japan, Korea and other East Asian regions.
The Library holds large collections of films, documentaries, and music material from / about East Asia, in physical or digital formats. Information about these resources can be found below.
DVDs films and documentaries in Main Library and ECA Library
There are several thousand DVDs feature films and documentaries in the Main Library and Edinburgh College of Art Library, including several hundred East Asian films. To retrieve a list of Chinese, Japanese or Korean films in DiscoverEd, do Advanced search as the following screenshot shows:
Or simply click the pre-fabricated search here. As of September 2020, you can retrieve 833 audio-visual items for "Chinese OR China", 387 for "Japanese OR Japan", and 99 for "Korea?" (? is used for trauncated search for both Korea and Korean).
Languages and Humanities Centre & VidCat
There is a large collection of world films and documentaries in the Language and Humanities Centre within the LLC School’s Resource Centre on the first floor of 50 George Square. Its Video Catalogue Search (VIDCAT) within MyEd (you may need to add the VIDCAT Channel through the tab on the top left of the MyEd window) offers easy access to the list by title searching or browsing.
There are currently around 9000 items, from rare BBC documentaries to animated short films, from Hollywood blockbusters to post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. DVD players as well as video and audio editing facilities are available on site. Staff and postgraduate students can borrow items from the collection overnight. To search for East Asian films, just use Chinese, Japanese or Korean as search term.
Video items in VIDCAT are NOT listed in DiscoverEd.
Many films have also been streamed in the University's Media Hopper under the UK Educational Licence Agency Licence for UoE users.
Box of Broadcasts
Public playlists. University of Edinburgh login is required for using Box of Broadcasts.
- Chinese films (18 items) Compiled by University of Surrey
- Contemporary Japanese Cinema (6 items) Films for the course Contemporary Japanese Cinema, a 4th year honours and PGT course at the University of Edinburgh
- Japanese animie with subtitles (27 items) Compiled by Manchester Metropolitan University. The list does not include dubbed films.
- Japanese films (105 items) Compiled by Dr Kristin Williams, University of Cambridge
- Korean films (41 items) Compiled by Dr Kristin Williams, University of Cambridge
BFI Player
Content to be added very soon
Internet Archive videos
The Moving Image Archive in Internet Archive offers over 5.8 million free movies, documentaries and videos for downloading or watching, including tens of thousands in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.
As of 9 June 2020, there are 51,131 media resources in Korean, 7,086 in Japanese, and 2,356 in Chinese:
YouTube channels
There are a lot of open-access video resources on YouTube to discover and watch, including East Asian films.
Academic Video Online
Academic Video Online is a multidisciplinary collection of videos that touches on the curriculum needs of virtually every department. With 66,000 titles available now and 400 new titles per month, this collection is unmatched in its breadth. Academic Video Online allows students and researchers alike to analyse unique and valuable content from over 500 producers and distributors around the world.
All individual videos are catalogued in DiscoverEd.
- Asian Studies ChannelsHundreds of videos in 137 channels on the history, people, art, politics and international relations in Asia.
Examples of channels:
- Asian Film Online (916 videos)
- Cultural Revolution, China, 1966-1972 (5 videos)
- Mao Zedong (21 videos)
- Japanese American Internment, 1942-1945 (11 videos)
- Korea Conflict, 1950-1953 (295 videos)
- Kim Jong-II (12 videos)
East Asian film studies
- Chinese Independent Film Archive (CIFA) CIFA is dedicated to the preservation of and access to Chinese independent film culture. It holds a large and rare collection of films and footage, their associated material culture, existing publications on Chinese independent cinema in both English and Chinese, and oral history material. Created and published by Newcastle University.
Music of China, Japan and Korea
The Library subscribes to Music and Dance Online which gives access to 10 million audio tracks, 3,600+ videos, 1.3 million pages of scores and 124,000+ pages of reference material on world music and dance. It contains 494 collections of music from China, Japan and Korea.
Examples:
