Penn State’s 2024 top leisure reading, viewing titles at University Libraries

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For Penn State readers and movie fans seeking some leisure entertainment during the winter break, Penn State University Libraries has several options to suggest, including digital-access content, from its resources’ most popular titles of 2024.

Penn State students and employees can access the following content online and hundreds of thousands of other video, audio and e-book content using their Penn State login. With the exception of Kaltura and Libby, the following sources are linked through the University Libraries’ Databases section of its website — which currently lists 1,001 databases.

For Penn Staters who prefer music listening, the University Libraries’ databases list also includes access to more than a dozen music-streaming sources.

Alexander Street offers large-scale digital collections in the humanities and social sciences, according to its website, “concentrating on building the best collections we can across the curriculum — in literature; music; women's history; black history; psychological counseling and therapy; social and cultural history; drama, medical, theatre, film and the performing arts; religion; sociology; and other emerging areas.”

Penn State’s Alexander Street Top 10 Most-Watched Videos of 2024:

1. Plants Behaving Badly: Murder & Mayhem
2. The Poison Squad
3. Baseball, Part 5: Shadow Ball
4. Sound and Fury: The Communication Wars of the Deaf
5. Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man
6. Freedom Summer
7. The Prohibition Years
8. Treating Borderline Personality Disorder
9. Art Therapy Has Many Faces
10. Green Fire

According to its website, “Docuseek streams essential independent, social-issue and environmental films to colleges, universities and K-12 schools, providing exclusive access to content from renowned leaders in documentary film distribution.”

Penn State’s Top 10 Docuseek Titles of 2024:

1. The Life and Times of Sara Baartman
2. The Motherhood Manifesto
3. Cured
4. The Homestretch
5. The Gig Is Up
6. Plastic Paradise
7. Banking Nature
8. In the Light of Reverence
9. How to Let Go of the World and Love All the...
10. The Waiting Room

The University Libraries’ Kaltura channel includes digital multimedia that may be copyrighted but perhaps not currently accessible through other available channels.

Penn State University Libraries’ Top 10 Kaltura Title Playbacks 2024:

1. Kids for Cash
2. Race: The Power of an Illusion Ep. 2
3. Beer Wars
4. The Linguists
5. Coded Bias
6. Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter
7. RiverBlue
8. Hannah Arendt
9. Good Morning Mr. Hitler
10. Penn State University Libraries’ Political-Song-A-Palooza

Kanopy is a video-streaming platform self-described as “dedicated to thoughtful and thought-provoking films.​”

Kanopy Top Videos at Penn State 2024:

1. How I Live
2. Warning: This Drug May Kill You: The Grave Consequences of Opioid Abuse
3. Photographer – Photographs of the Lodz Ghetto During World War II
4. The Bad Kids

Libby by OverDrive has provided free access to leisure e-books and audiobooks to the University community for the past two years. Here are Penn Staters’ top 10 leisure reads and listens from 2024.

Penn State’s Top 10 Libby E-books of 2024:

1. The Handmaid's Tale
2. Demon Copperhead
3. Bridgerton Collection, Volume 1
4. Butcher & Blackbird [tied];It Ends With Us [tied]
5. A Court of Silver Flames
6. Book Lovers
7. The Unhoneymooners
8. House of Earth and Blood [tied]; Verity [tied]; Yellowface [tied]
9. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries
10. The Alice Network: A Novel

Penn State’s Most-Borrowed Libby Audiobooks of 2024:

1. The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
2. The Fellowship of the Ring
3. No One Can Know: A Novel [tied]; Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel [tied]
4. Beach Read [tied]; The Things We Leave Unfinished [tied]
5. Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir [tied]; Mad Honey: A Novel [tied]; The Guest List: A Novel [tied];The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue [tied]
6. People We Meet on Vacation
7. The Midnight Library [tied]; The Thursday Murder Club [tied]; The Women: A Novel [tied]; Yellowface [tied]
8. Pride and Prejudice [tied]; The Alchemist [tied]; The Last Thing He Told Me: A Novel [tied]; The Nanny [tied]; Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A novel [tied]; Wrong Place Wrong Time: A Novel [tied]
9. Hello Beautiful [tied]; Spells for Forgetting: A Novel [tied]; The Assassin's Blade [tied]; The Bookbinder: A Novel [tied]; The Song of Achilles: A Novel [tied]; The Nightingale: A Novel [tied]

As noted on its University Libraries webpage, Swank Motion Pictures, a distributor of feature films, provides online streaming access via their Digital Campus service through an agreement funded by the University Libraries. Movies from major motion picture studios are available for online streaming when requested by a Penn State instructor for use in a Penn State course.

Penn State’s Top 10 Swank Motion Pictures Digital Campus Title Playbacks of 2024:

1. Goodfellas
2. Casablanca
3. Schindler’s List
4. Citizen Kane
5. Life Is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella)
6. The Wizard of Oz
7. Rear Window
8. Blade Runner - The Final Cut
9. A Civil Action
10. Kramer vs. Kramer

Everyone at Penn State University Libraries wishes the entire University community a joyous, restorative winter break brimming with fulfilling leisure time, and looks forward to welcoming everyone back to Penn State library spaces in person and online in 2025.