Slashdot Mirror
Google to Digitize National Archives Footage
Anil Kandangath writes "Google today announced their pilot program to digitize the entire video content of the National Archives and make it globally accessible for free on Google Video. The history of the world should be universally accessible and this is definitely a great step towards making sure that our history is not lost, and that everyone has equal and easy access towards such information. Google has provided some sample videos from the National Archives, such as the 1969 moon landing."
as to call it the history of the world, but in all fairness to NARA, it has a great deal of captured documentation from the Second World War and some other sources. So, it's more than a mere history of America.
Actually, the first video I tried ('The eagle has landed 1969') is downloadable as an .avi file. 67 Mb, 480x360 divx. I'd call that pretty good.
I've been working on a digital archives project here at work, and apparently there's an open source archive product called Fedora. One of the interesting features of it is that the archived format of the digital object can be different from the presented format of the digital object. So in the case of movies, you can archive a high-res MPEG4 or whatever format you want, but display it to web-based users as a crappy low-res Flash movie. When user requirements change (e.g., users' bandwidth dramatically increases), then you can change the format in which you deliver the archived objects without having to go through the archival procedure again. I can't imagine that Google isn't doing something similar.
I think you can also download reasonable-res AVI versions of the video files and two different MP4 versions for the iPod & PSP.
Look at the right side of the window, the 'This video' tab. The download button is right there, between the video title and the thumbnails.
No thank you. It costs $0.20 to make a copy or $180/hour for copy of video footage at the Library of Congress. I welcome the Google service and I hope they make millions on it.
I use Greasemonkey and the download link script.
You're right, but as the poster says "The history of the world should be universally accessible."
Now my country has birthed a bigarse huge/scary megacorporation with a passion for proliferating content, much of it free, and is now happily dumping all of the video history we have onto the table, for the world's benefit.
Tell me, what did YOUR country do to help reach the common goal?
I'm not saying we're saints just because we shared our video collection. But I am saying that before you go whining about how people shouldn't be celebrating America, maybe you should have a contribution of your own to hold up alongside ours?
If you don't, maybe a little less whining and a little more [working towards getting your own country's video archives released for the rest of the worlds benefit] might be in order?