Netflix lists?

[celticdragonfly]

Dear flist, help me out here.

I've been watching some videos from the library with the kids. It's been nice, I can actually sit and knit and get Jamie to sit next to me and only mess with my knitting now and then, a vast improvement. We're not watching kid videos - well, we're watching some of that, but that's not what I'm checking out from the library. What I'm getting is generally nonfiction, documentaries and historical stuff, stuff that's kid safe but adult interesting. Recent stuff included a video on the Shakers, an A&E series on Victoria and Albert, and in the upcoming queue is a video on wolves with one of my favorite actors hosting.

I want to find more of this. It's hard to go through the nonfiction videos at the local library, as the aisles are close enough that Jamie in his stroller can grab stuff from both sides, and he does. I love getting books and such through the computer system, I can search the whole library system, not just one branch, and they bring them to the one library to pick them up, and have them on hold up front. Bliss. But I'm having a hard time searching out videos by subject that way, you can limit the search to videocassettes in theory, but it doesn't seem to work.

I want to find stuff like A&E series, History channel stuff, Discovery channel stuff. Stuff like Connections, but later, and oh I wish I could remember the name of that series Karl has one taped-from-cable tape of somewhere buried, the one with one of the Monty Python guys doing interesting historical stuff, like bathing habits in imperial Rome and how and why China developed the clock.

So I figure a lot of you have Netflix, and some of you may have similar tastes. Please recommend specific titles to me. I can search on them in the library database (anyone feeling particularly inspired to be helpful is welcome to look and see if they have it yourself, http://fwplipac.fortworthlibrary.org/ ), and then have the darling helpful library minions find them for me and send them down to the SW branch, which surely will start greeting me by name at the front desk any time now.

Thanks!

Comments

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Any one of Micheal Palin's travel series like Pole to Pole, Around the World in 80 Days, or Irish Railway Journey: Derry to Kerry are worth getting, as is Terry Jones' Medival Lives and The Crusades.

[jazz007.livejournal.com]

Don't know if it's quite what you're looking for, but I've been recently hooked by kd5mdk and friends on Horatio Hornblower, the A&E video series. Young kid gets his daddy's friend to let him into crew, gets transferred to a fabulous captain and characterically developed for all he's worth.

IMDB Listings:
http://imdb.com/find?q=Horatio%20Hornblower;tt=on;nm=on;mx=20

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much the type of thing we're looking for, but we've seen those already. We did watch those at night, after the kids were in bed, we thought they might be too violent for them.

[daveamongus.livejournal.com]

I just got "Russian Ark" from Netflix, which is a story of Russian history told through the halls of the Hermitage Museum, shot in one very long take.

I haven't watched it yet so, it being Russian history, I'll let you know if it is actually kid-safe.

[daveamongus.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaand it seems to be kid-safe. In Russian, and thus subtitled, and rather weird, not to mention a bit melancholy... but the visuals themselves are beautiful and educational enough, I think.

Certainly going to buy it and make my kids watch it ;)

Catching up w/my FL

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Because my inbox is just too scary (go offline for a day or two and... yoiks--!) Anyhoo, I thought I'd toss out a couple search strategies for the library computer you're using.

1. Go to "advanced search" and use the subject keyword to pick anything you're even remotely interested in: History. Animals. Sports. Etc.

2. Go down to the next set of boxes ("Refine your search" and picke either "videocassette" or "DVD" from the drop-down menu.

3. Hit the red "Go" button at the top.

Here's what I got using "national geographic": http://makeashorterlink.com/?J1052212B

To get ideas for subject keywords, do a search for a movie you liked in "basic search" Once you find it, try clicking on some of the subject links. Or plug them into the search model. (above)

Better yet, make your librarian do the search for you. That's what she's been hired to do after all! Your library system has the same feature mine does (and with any luck it's staffed by the same nice people who don't mind getting e-mailed questions at 3am about what the word for "mercy knife" is because I can't remember it and it's bugging me and keeping me awake. Answer: Misericorde) This: http://www.answerzone.org/
It's a 24-hour librarian live chat. After the kiddies are in bed, log in and tell them what you told us. Shoot - it's chat - just cut and paste.

Hope this helps!

Re: Catching up w/my FL

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

That's what SHOULD work. It isn't working for me.

I tried that last week with a subject. Searching on just the subject came up with TONS of stuff, great. Searching on the subject with refine your search and picking videocassette came up with three listings - all of which were books. (bangs head on desk)

What I came up with most recently is to toss "A&E" into the title field. That got me a listing for Arts and Entertainment Network, which I browsed through the 417 listings and put a bunch of them onto a sublist. I'm going to request some of them, but now I can't get into the sublist. I'm hoping they were just having website problems yesterday...