The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Spring Association Meeting featured the sixth annual ARL Film Festival (the Arlies). The festival highlights member-created videos that promote and generate awareness for library spaces, services, collections, and more.

UT Libraries received a 2021 Arlie award in the Best Performance category for “We Got Your E-Books,” part of a series of one-minute videos created in the summer of 2020 to help university students who were learning remotely. 

In one minute, “We Got Your E-Books” conveys a few simple ideas: (1) There are several routes to locating e-books, including OneSearch on the UT Libraries website, as well as our subscription databases and e-book collections. (2) The HathiTrust digital repository — which during the pandemic gave UT users emergency temporary access to more than a million e-books — is well worth exploring for your research needs. (3) If you need additional help with your online research, our librarians are available through Chat on the Libraries’ website.

Drawing on scripts created for our series of one-minute videos, Shelly O’Barr, a staff member from our Studio media production lab, wrote rap lyrics about how to access e-books, then passed them over to her Studio co-worker Trey Hobson with instructions to “do a nice boom-clack beat and run with it.” That’s Trey rapping on “We Got Your E-Books.” Shelly, who serves as the Libraries’ official photographer and videographer, produced the final video.

Congratulations to everyone involved in creating this year’s award-winning film. Be sure to check out information on our previous Arlie award.