Sourcing the right educational video often starts with a subject area but teaching and research rarely stay neatly within disciplinary boundaries. A faculty member teaching a course on refugees might be approaching the topic through political science, sociology, human rights, or Middle Eastern studies. A student researching public health could benefit from documentaries found not only in health-related collections, but also in sociology, education, environmental science, or public policy. To make these connections easier to find, we’ve introduced more than 380 new topical shelves across Kanopy’s academic subject pages, creating new pathways for discovery that reflect how topics are studied in the real world. 

 These new shelves go beyond broad academic disciplines and highlight specific areas of interest within each field. Instead of simply browsing Psychology, for example, users can now explore focused topics such as Grief, Memory, PTSD, Identity & Self-Perception, or Understanding Human Behavior. Similar expansions have been created across the catalog, from Business and Political Science to Nursing, Environmental Sciences, Media Studies, Anthropology, and many more. The result is a browsing experience that feels less like searching through a large collection and more like exploring a curated research guide built around the questions people are actually asking.  

 For librarians, these shelves offer a new way to support instruction, collection promotion, and research assistance. For faculty, they provide faster access to course-relevant content without requiring extensive searching. And for students, they make it easier to discover related materials that may not have appeared through a keyword search alone. Whether you’re looking for documentaries on Climate Change through a political lens, Addiction from a psychology perspective, or Freedom of Speech across multiple disciplines, these shelves help surface content within the academic context most relevant to your work.  

 We encourage users to explore beyond a single subject page and take advantage of these new discovery pathways to uncover connections, perspectives, and resources across the curriculum.