Advancing Film, Learning and Discovery: Beamafilm at CAUL 2026
News
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Beamafilm
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19/06/2026
Beamafilm was delighted to take part in the CAUL Exhibition Event 2026, connecting with academic librarians and information professionals in Wellington, Melbourne and Sydney. Three cities, two countries and one great opportunity to connect with the university library community across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Organised by the Council of Australasian University Librarians (CAUL), this year's event marked an important milestone, with the exhibition extending to Aotearoa New Zealand for the first time. Beginning at Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington on 16 June, the event continued to Melbourne on 18 June and Sydney on 19 June, bringing together library professionals and around 40 content and technology providers at each location.
For Beamafilm, it was a valuable opportunity to hear directly from university libraries about how streaming video is evolving as part of the academic collection.
Film as an academic resource
Film has an increasingly important role to play in teaching, learning and research.
Documentaries, independent films and international cinema can bring subjects to life in ways that complement traditional scholarly resources, whether students are studying film and media, history, politics, anthropology, Indigenous studies, the environment, social sciences, languages or the arts.
But simply providing access to a streaming collection isn't enough.
One of the strongest themes in our conversations at CAUL was the importance of making digital resources easy to discover, integrate and use within existing academic workflows.
For Beamafilm, that means ensuring films can sit alongside books, journals and other resources in the discovery environments students and academics already use.
From discovery to the classroom
Beamafilm continues to invest in integrations designed specifically for the academic library environment.
Through discovery and knowledge-base integrations, MARC records and other library tools, our goal is to make it easier for students to encounter relevant films during their normal research journey, rather than requiring them to already know that Beamafilm exists.
Our growing Film Studies and Film Festivals collections also help students and educators explore cinema through areas such as auteur cinema, cinematography, screenwriting, documentary studies, Indigenous cinema, world cinema and other key disciplines.
The opportunity goes beyond Film Studies. A documentary discovered during research can become a teaching resource, spark a classroom discussion or introduce a student to a perspective they may not have encountered elsewhere.
Listening to academic libraries
The greatest value of events like CAUL is the opportunity for genuine face-to-face conversation.
We particularly appreciated hearing from librarians about the changing needs of their institutions, from licensing flexibility and discoverability to accessibility, usage and demonstrating value from digital collections.
These conversations are helping shape Beamafilm's approach to the academic market, including the way we structure our licensing models and support universities in connecting relevant content with courses, faculty and students.
They're also a reminder that every institution is different. Academic collections need flexibility to respond to different disciplines, enrolments, budgets and patterns of use.
A truly trans-Tasman community
It was particularly exciting to see CAUL's 2026 Exhibition Event extend to Wellington.
CAUL now operates as a fully integrated trans-Tasman organisation, with university library colleagues from Aotearoa New Zealand participating as full constitutional members alongside their Australian counterparts.
For Beamafilm, which works with libraries on both sides of the Tasman, that makes CAUL an increasingly valuable forum for sharing ideas about the future of academic content and discovery across the region.
A huge thank you to the CAUL team and everyone who took the time to meet and talk with Beamafilm in Wellington, Melbourne and Sydney.
We returned from CAUL with new ideas, valuable feedback and an even stronger conviction that streaming film has an important place in the modern academic library.
We look forward to continuing those conversations and helping universities connect more students, educators and researchers with remarkable stories from Australia, New Zealand and around the world.
Discover more about Beamafilm for academic libraries and sign up for a 30-day online trial.
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