Some of the Asian American documentaries in CAAM’s distribution catalogue are available to stream through Kanopy. Since 2014, we have been in partnership with the streaming service, which is home to titles such as Mele Murals, Changing Season: On the Masumoto Family Farm, and Roots in the Sand.
Kanopy was originally founded in 2008 in Australia, before later relocating to San Francisco. Its focus is geared towards providing educational content to libraries and educational institutions for free with a card, or to any student enrolled in a university that subscribes to the platform, making it more accessible than many other streamers which require a paid subscription.
UC Berkeley is one of those colleges which offers Kanopy to its students. Gisèle Tanasse, a film and media services librarian at Berkeley, remembers when the university first started using Kanopy around 2016. Tanasse recalled that the company was selling hard to educational institutions and had reached out to the school’s administrators. She also recalled sustainability issues with the platforms in those early years, due to the setup of a patron-driven acquisition model that made it expensive on the university’s side – more than three times the total budget for media at the time. Tanasse believes that early feedback from institutions like Berkeley eventually led Kanopy to become more attainable.
Kanopy has also been available to patrons of the San Francisco Public Library since 2017.
“We really wanted to meet a need with our patrons,” eResources librarian Daniel Matsumoto explained. “With the likes of Netflix and Hulu and [Amazon] Prime, the library really needed a competing platform, because we know that a lot of our patrons were seeking that content. We looked around for partners that worked with public libraries in particular, and Kanopy was one that really came to the forefront.”
At the same time, Jerry Dear, an information strategist at SFPL, recalled how the library also wanted to work to maintain a balance between those who prefer streaming content, and those who prefer the physical media route.
“We’re always trying to get the right resource to the right person at the right place at the right time,” he said. “The library is a growing organism, so we’re evolving with the needs of the community, the society. That’s just the library at the end of it. It’s part of our mission statement and our code of ethics that frames it.”
Tanasse believes Berkeley’s early experience with Kanopy proved that streaming services aren’t just merely for entertainment purposes, but can be an access point to content that would otherwise be hard to come by.
Annie Pho, the head of Instruction & Outreach at Gleeson Library at the University of San Francisco, expressed similar sentiments. At the same time, she noted how the university has more limited access to Kanopy’s catalogue than SFPL. As a result, students and faculty often must make a request for a certain title, or to stream it by way of the public library.
Even after OverDrive (an e-book distributor also used by libraries) acquired Kanopy in 2021, Matsumoto noted how the platform is still very much geared for libraries. He believes that’s what patrons find so appealing – so much that a librarian at the Richmond Branch of SFPL has put on a film festival based around the content available there.
Despite the changes that Kanopy has undergone over the years, Pho doesn’t find that the user experience has changed much, but believes the resource is underutilized by students. “From the university perspective, I think that’s one barrier, but I wouldn’t say that the experience itself has changed,” she commented. “I think because the way we use it is so specific, I don’t know that the interface has super changed a ton for us.”
As for feedback from users, Tanasee explained how for the most part, students and faculty are generally happy and satisfied with the content and video quality, though did note how it can be confusing when some titles have only a three-year license and the expiration dates aren’t listed.
“It helps to know that the service is very reliable, and that it’s shocking to them when something goes wrong, and that they have enough trust in it to reach out and be like, ‘Hey, what’s going on here? ’” she added.
At SFPL, many of the patrons have been using Kanopy since it was first made available eight years ago, and new users are constantly coming aboard every month through their programming and outreach.
“It’s just a great educational tool for them,” said Matsumoto. “The documentaries are so popular in general on Kanopy. They’ve always been very popular. I think that’s the type of material that Kanopy really started with.”
Kanopy is one of SFPL’s highest performing digital resources, and the streaming service will continue to be offered for patrons going forward into the future.
Pho, however, hopes that the service will consider making it more affordable for libraries that maybe don’t have as big of a budget. It’s the price that, as she said, has been the biggest barrier for USF.
Some older Asian American titles can be watched through Kanopy, including influential works such as Arthur Dong’s Sewing Woman, Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, and Grace Lee’s The Grace Lee Project. While these titles aren’t distributed by CAAM, they are foundational films in the Asian American maker community and have screened at CAAMFest. Librarians like Pho hope Kanopy will recognize the value of also keeping older films on their platform, especially when they can be hard to stream them anywhere else.
“I do feel like Kanopy is sometimes a good option for streaming if it’s not streaming on some of the other platforms that are out there,” she said. “There is actually a need for accessing things that are older than what they deem as modern.”
