Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Google goes Archival and other beautiful stories of global cooperation through digital media

Just spied on eContentMag.com:
Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and Google Co-Founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin have announced the launch of a pilot program to make holdings of the National Archives available for free online. This non-exclusive agreement will enable researchers and the general public to access a diverse collection of historic movies, documentaries and other films from the National Archives via Google Video as well as the National Archives site.

The pilot program undertaken by the National Archives and Google features 103 films from the audiovisual collections preserved at the Archives....more
The National Archives and Google are exploring the possibilities of expanding the on-line film collection and making the Archives extensive textual holdings available via the Internet.
***
Alice asks politely, "How about through the nation's libraries, too?"

I had a really cool experience yesterday, as I worked away on sorting out the Web pieces parts of our NetLibrary 25% off Subject Sets offer. Unrelated to the offer, but there we are.

I received a message referred to me from a magazine editor in Brazil. She had found WWII propaganda posters online, from the Northwestern University Library's Digital Collections.

Naturally, being an editor she needed these images right away and provided her FTP address for upload.
Well it took me about 2 minutes to e-mail Beth Clausen, the head of the Government and Geographic Information and Data Services, to explain the situation. And by the time I blinked twice, Beth had e-mailed the editor, explained the pricing and this brazilian editor was good to go with her images.

In a manner of hours, we had 4 locations, 3 institutions and 2 languages connected and in fact, the goods delivered. Viva la Internet! The world is flat indeed.

No comments: