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."

One

One small step for google kind?

YAY!

The history of the world will be archived in the form of crappy, low resolution flash movies!!!

Re:YAY!

Here's another way to think about it,

The 1969 moon landing will be archived along with other gems of human history, such as "Poop Today" [google.com] and "My ex-girlfriend shows her pussy" [google.com]. Frankly, kudos to Google! I can't wait.

Re:YAY!

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.

Re:YAY!

Wow.

Just..wow. What would make you not complain?

They're giving you something quite nice for free and you still spit on it!

AND it got modded insightful!

Re:YAY!

We have access to a staggering amount of information - the collected knowledge of the world is at our fingertips. Yay us.

Yes, yay us. But all this information in the world is useless unless we put it to good use.

I have a friend who is extremely proud of the mega tool collection he has in his garage. He could do so much with it, like fix cars for extra cash, or maybe build an electronic gizmo with instructions found on the Internet. But he doesn't, so to him those tools are worthless.

Our collective information is great, now we just need to do something with it!

Valid question...

He happens to be wrong regarding the actual resolutions involved, but his question was entirely valid. Please don't knock people for asking questions. If no one asks questions, you only get what the first guy thought of. If everyone questions and debates (in a mature manner) however, you get the best people can come up with.

Actually, I'd like to ask a related question. Are Google also providing the national archives with their OWN copy, in an open format, which they are free to use as they see fit? I know that's part of what the Libraries involved in Google Scholar/Books have been offered, and that's the only reason I think they should participate. It's all well and good that Google makes this stuff available online for free, but the stuff belongs to us all, and its digitisation shouldn't be restricted to google.com, or any other .com

Low Res Yes, But Crappy?

I hate to break this to you, but for most of the history of "movies" it's all been pretty low-res. I watched those shots form the moon live in 1969, and it didn't look any better than what I just called called up on my extremely hi-res monitor. The main difference being that in 1969 my college student budget extended to a black and white tube set from the Salvation Army Trift Store. We're talking about an analog video squirt from the moon at a time when I was doing college physics and chemistry with a slide rule and calculus with a pencil.

These images are extremely important, and having them freely available is priceless. Rading about history is not the same as seeing the people involved. Seeing Churchill give a speech is far better than reading it. Seeing Nixon's Checkers speech is priceless.

I want Zapruder!

Betcha they don't make the Zapruder movie available. Betcha! It's these wily Republicans in charge now, their parents and grandparents probably had a finger in assassinating JFK and won't to cover it up.

Or maybe it's just that their natural secretiveness will extend to this.

But I betcha we don't get the Zapruder movie.

Moon Landing?

So Google is archiving made-up stuff too?

Wow

NARA is actually letting someone digitize important stuff. Now if they'd only digitize something useful like their CREST database, then I could avoid driving down there twice a week for thesis work.

CREST is a searchable database of CIA documents released under some executive order by Clinton. It's pretty cool. More importantly, it's free.

Like archive.org...

...only a different target collection (archive.org has a "moving images" collection too).

Archive.org could use their support too...their site performance is usually sluggish, though they already have some biggies sponsoring them, including HP, NSF and the LOC.

this is how it starts...

Does this seem suspiciously like the giant-brain episode of Futurama to anyone else?

It all started as an innocent attempt to record and catalog everything in the universe.. but the brains decided they had to destroy the universe right after it finished recording the last bit of data, so things would stop happening and new data would not have to be recorded.

History of the World?

How the hell is the US national archives the "history of the world"?

It's exactly what it says it is - the "US National Archives" - i.e. the US version of video recorded history, given whatever slant the news networks of the day were putting on things.

I'm not anti-American (I have American family), but I WISH the US would remember that they are ONE country in a VERY big world.

I wouldn't go so far

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.

Good News

I just wanted to say this makes me feel better after reading the HD DVD AACS news for most of the day!!

where's the beef?

Assertion: Google is a bubble pure and simple. Where is their business case? I've always wondered, can someone enlighten me? They built a search engine in college that counts links and caches pages. They bought dejanews to cache USENET drivel. Wonder what will be the beginning of the end?

Could be good..but...

I am not so sure I trust Google anymore. I would think they would have no problems censoring based on government request. You'll be able to see old edison reels about the dog/sausage transmogrifier, but I bet selective quasi-current things, say Vietnam and newer, will be selectively censored.

Free for *download* would be good for this content

since we *own* it, we should really be able to download our own copies of this footage, rather than being forced to get a broadband connection to the internet and access Google's ( kinda junky, IMHO ) in-browser web player every time we want to view these.

I do like the fact that Google is digitizing this footage, though IMHO the government spending money on doing that and providing the end result to the public would be a much, much better way to spend our tax dollars than several other much more expensive expensive government projects I can think of...

History of the World Part 4.

"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. "

So put the entire thing on DVD's and mail everyone a copy who asks.*

*It's also the answer to the question, "what if the internet's down"?

no fair!

But they're violating history's copyright!

Shareholders Or Visionaries?

This very exciting news but I can't help but wonder if this compromises the altruism behind the contemporay concept of library archives.

Acording to Straight Dope [straightdope.com] The first trend is the so-called "social library," and it was invented by Benjamin Franklin. You could join his library by buying stock in his company and books were only available to members.

Almost 200 years later came along the Scottish-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie thought libraries and books should be available to everyone. He was attacked by both the right, which called him a Communist for wanting to use taxes for libraries, and the left, which viewed taxes as a drain on the working man. By 1920, the Carnegie estate had donated $50 million to erect 2,500 library buildings, including 1,700 in the U.S.

Oversimplifications aside, which one is Google? The visionary? Or the profiteer?

National Archives

Why can't the National Archives provide this service? I would like to see public property in the hand of the public.

How about productions by PBS and NPR? Where are their digital archives?

Re:National Archives

For the same reason that not all jails are run by the government, infrastructure. Google may be able to do it cheaper (possibly free to the government?) as opposed to having the National Archives (sic) do it themselves. It costs time, money, and a ton of resources I'd imagine to transfer this type of material. Now, wether or not Google tries to profit from this archive is another story. Based on the content, I don't think it would be possible to profit from it, except perhaps by licensing the database of the archived material to some vendor that wanted to build a search tool .. or something ... but I'm rambling.

Jails (quite a number of them) can, and usually are, be privately run. Just like in the IT world were services are outsourced. I'm sure Google is charging someone for this, it just better not be the public, atleast not directly.

just my 2cents.

And when the documents become "reclassified?"

Will this lead to the administration reclassifying more documents, or at a greater rate in order to prevent their global dissemination? BBC Story on Reclassification. [bbc.co.uk] There is some legitimate concern that having all those documents so readily available can pose a problem. I am less concerned about someone coming to city hall and looking at tax records than I am with universal availability of the same information online, and in a readily searchable form. I generally land squarely on the more access side, but this issue could lend credence to administration concerns.

Fantastic

If this prevents me from sitting through another 'informative' speech in one of my classes about how the lunar landing never happened, then I'm all for it.

lessons in codec aging

>this is definitely a great step towards making sure that our history is not lost

possibly.. it could also be a lesson in data formats if the material is as volumnous as i think it is.. i've got a 10 year old cd of some dragonball z fansubs in some old divx(3.11aplha?) w/ a hacked audio codec.. it's tough to play those anymore.. silly extreme example, but for a more serious one, look at old software and the need for emulation.

if i were trying to sell a video codec, i would be begging for google to use mine in this endeavor.

Making it available globally

Does this mean that this is the one service Google won't censor in China?

But the million dollar question is...

Are they going to digitize stuff that is than reclassified [slashdot.org] and will they KEEP it digitized, or will they fall to the pressures of the CIA?

The net's killer app -- now come on, BBC!

I applaud this initiative very loudly and long. So few people seem to understand that this is part of the web's mission. Let's hope Google succeeds where the BBC's grand plan [bbc.co.uk] to share their UK public-owned radio and TV archive seems to have stalled [bbc.co.uk] (100 clips in 2 years?) - although they are giving the world some top-notch video processing software [bbc.co.uk] in the process.

Here's my favourite line from that page:

For the BBC, open source software development is an extension of our Public Service remit.

You can't get less evil than that.

From the BBC's announcement in August 2003:

The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes, Mr Dyke added.

"The BBC probably has the best television library in the world," said Mr Dyke, who was speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival.

"Up until now this huge resource has remained locked up, inaccessible to the public because there hasn't been an effective mechanism for distribution.

"But the digital revolution and broadband are changing all that.

"For the first time there is an easy and affordable way of making this treasure trove of BBC content available to all."

He predicted that everyone would benefit from the online archive, from people accessing the internet at home, children and adults using public libraries, to students at school and university.

Google's response to Verizon's dumbassery

This would be a great indirect response from Google to Verizon's asshattery of wanting to charge them for bandwidth. Google can say that they're simply trying to host the archives of important historical events and Verizon is attacking them for more money for bandwidth. Google comes out looking really good. I think they've hired a new marketing team. That's what this is all about!

The history of the world should be universally...

"The history of the world should be universally accessible" is an idealistic thought. But who pays for the infrastructure that makes all of this free (as in beer) media possible? Don't start a free/Communist/pay/Capitalist flame war - I'm not taking a side, I just think that there's a growing trend to provide either free media or places for people to upload their own media, and I don't see what's paying for the hardware and people-ware to support it.

Maybe it's time for ... "Gnuugle"?

Think of it: if Wikipedia can function as a distributed encyclopedia maintained by self-interested parties, why not do the same with search-engine technology? This would eliminate central control, and fears that "the man" could rewrite digital history.

The name "Gnuugle" sort of conveys the idea: a distributed-index commons, if you will. Of course, others are possible -- maybe "Woogle"?

great firewall

Do you think 1989's Tienanmen Square assault footage will be streamable from inside the great firewall of China?

Moon landing unedited

THis is the unedited audio recording of the moon landing. [evolution-control.com]

Great!

It' really great news that "The History Of The World" will be universally accessible. If enough people watch it and apreciate it, maybe Mel Brooks will consider shooting Part II!

Future of Google

Here's a question for people: Where do you think that Google is going? I mean, what is there ultimate goal? Where do you see Google in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years? How ubiquitous will they be? What services will they provide? Just some food for thought. Please respond.

Fair and Balanced

Luckily Google is hosting this [google.com] footage to bring "fairness and balance" to the acrchived moon footage.

Sorry, but we've decided to classify that

The video you requested no matter what it was or how old, has been reclassified in the interest of National Security.

What about countries limiting historic info?

So what if china (or another country) tells google to remove specific historial data from these archives?

/. proof

This is possibly the first video link ever to have graced the front page and survived a /.ing. Google has grown too strong... we must fear them.

This is fantastic news...

But where is Google getting the money for all these cool projects? This one sounds like they're going to need a LOT of server space....and a lot of money

Is Google-Hi-Res available?

I watched the moon landing video from the link and it looked horrible. It was blocky, grainy, low-res and filled with compression artifacts. Does anyone know if Google plans on making higher quality video available in the future? I Google is archiving this stuff at a higher resolution and a much higher optical density, especially when doing high contrast space films.

better to do the Lib of Congress

Doing the USA National Archives is great. But the real challenge is digitizing the Library of Congress. I fear that a lot of the mid-level literature of the 'greatest generation' will be lost because of the Mickey Mouse copyright law. If the copyright starts roughly around 1925 and continues indefinitely due to roll-over extensions, then the books printed from 1925 through about 1995 will be locked up and possibly lost forever.
    No one will risk being sent to gitmo for copyright by republishing 20th century books and the companies that 'own' them won't republish them because there is no profit in it. When the paper dissolves, they will be gone. Gone with them will be the ability of future historians to have insight into what made these people's thoughts, values, and development process that comes from examining literature from the period. There will always be some books from the era kept around, but the bulk will be lost.

    I'm not worried about the books from 1995 on because the people from this era realize that copyright laws are just total bullshit. They will digitize and circulate their favorite written literature on P2P networks in the same manner that is already being done with music recordings. Many sci-fi books are available on Kazaa, but very little is there outside the sci-fi genre.

    But this won't happen for the literature from the bulk of the 20th century. I've never met a single person who is digitizing (saving for prosperity) pop paperbacks. When they're gone, they're gone as if they had never been written at all.

    I first noticed this when looking for a copy of Trevanian's Shibumi from 1979. Great book, but now getting difficult to find. There must be tens of thousands of books in this category.

    That's why we should digitize the Library of Congress. A big job, that may not even be possible given the delicate state of many of the older books.

Totally unfair

This land-grab for providing public access for free by a private corporation is a travesty. Just think about all the people whose property those archives are -- what about *their* rights?

Waitaminute ... Oh, yeah. Nevermind.

timothy

Copywright?

What will happen when I suck all Google's videos into my own archive, then offer them to the public in competition with Google? Will Google claim copyright on the videos that belong to me, an American citizen, that they got from my National Archives?

Are these videos public domain?

just wondering

They need to also do the National Film Registry.

There's some important material there that gets little attention. For example, there are only two "home videos" on the NFR, as far as I know. You can probably guess that the Zapruder footage from the Kennedy assassination is one. But the other one is by Dave Tatsuno, (who just died a week ago) interned at one of the Japanese-American relocation camps during the Second World War. His "Topaz" video is a glimpse of life for some Americans during a dark part of our history, that is often forgotten or glossed over by the propaganda of the period. (Look up "Topaz," which was the name of Tatsuno's camp, in the National Archive search engine and see what I mean.)

history sure had a lot of pixelation

google videos tend to have a pretty medicore resolution. It's too bad that these videos will likely lose a lot of their sentiment by being displayed at lo-res.

Anyone else have that funny feeling

that the mpaa/riaa is going to have a problem with this?

Sorry -- History of the US world

Forgive me if this is a repeat, but Google is solely offering up the US version of history, sadly.

As an American, I'd love to see more of the world from the rest of the world, but apparently I can't look to Google for that.

And here I was thinking maybe I could.

Anyone have any good suggestions for me on this front?

Dang, Moon Landing Audio is Edited Version

Does it bother anyone but me that the words said when man stepped foot on the moon have been edited? He blew his lines, and it has been changed in all the tapes. I can't believe the Archives saved the changed version. I was hoping to hear the original in all its embarrassing glory.

Corporate warfare

Google may think they are being philanthropic, but they haven't thought this one through.

There is a distinct possibility it may be the result of a competitive intelligence operation by Googles competitors.

Lets analyze the political forces involved.

Google is planning to offer, free, various library material that American taxpayers have spent billions of dollars collecting, producing and organizing. This money comes from federal, state, and local public funds as well as various private contributions, all of them usually with some sort of encumbrances.

There is always less funding for libraries than is needed, but this year represents a major shortfall. http://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/WOissues/washfundin g/funding.htm [ala.org]

Its an election year, and funding for schools and libraries are LOCAL politics, sure to be major issues in what promises to be many highly contested elections.

Google has lots of enemies http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/google.html [wired.com] who won't hesitate to take advantage of a situation like this; and they have plenty of lobbyists.

Here is my prediction.

Google goes ahead with their plans. Shortly after the elections, the GAO, various federal, state and local governments announce that they sueing to recover the costs of the material Google made available that was not within the encombrances posed by the original donations of funds. For bonus points, they may include the various penalties imposed by intellectual property acts as various parties assert rights to specific items in the distributed material.

*Poof* no more shortfall in library funding in the US, though Google shareholders might be a tad upset. There probably won't be a Sarbanes Oxley prosecution, and, who knows, a hostile takeover due to a cash flow crisis might be good for Google

I LIKE it... The empire strikes back with a competitive intelligence operation at it's finest. This is so much more fun than, say, a chair being thrown by a CEO or getting some congresspeople to complain about censorship. I can't wait to see if this plays out the way it looks.

Google is normally not this naive; they have competant legal staff who should have pointed all this out. I wonder what else is going on?

Like in that Heinlein novel...

Reminds me (most closely) of the archives employed in Heinlein's For Us, The Living. I don't think I'll ever get enough of innovation following suggestion by science fiction. :)

Re:Outtakes

Dude, that video is a fake. They had to build a partial-vacuum sound stage before the dust kicked up would behave properly. Took 'em a ton of takes before they had that particular epiphany... But the point is, had Kissinger walked onto the moon set, he would have asphyxiated.

Re:Outtakes

Moon-landing conspiracy theorists never fail to amaze me. Of all the subjects to be suspicious about, people choose this one based on that silly Fox video. I tend to believe the 100,000 scientists and engineers who worked on the project over Fox TV marketing execs.