Online Video Archives
The amount of video material available online continues to increase at a remarkable clip (no pun intended). The BBC has established an online gallery of their archives that will eventually make 1,000,000 hours of video material available online. This will include over 70,000 hours of footage from CBS news as well. The focus of this material is for licensing, so it won’t be open for students to download clips without watermarks in them, but it’s a peek at how the Internet is changing the world of media. Up until now, the vast majority of this material has been sitting in a vault somewhere, probably never before available to the public. Now it will be available (at a cost) to anyone in the world with a web connection.
The Library of Congress has an extensive downloadable video collection, but it can be difficult to find. Their search system doesn’t let you select which kind of media you are looking for, so a search by the term “Puget Sound” will return every kind of document, sound recording, picture, film, or whatever they have in their archives. However, if you add the term “motion picture” to your search, it will help reduce the number of returned records. Once you’ve found clips that do match your general criteria, they usually also have links to similar files and collections.
They do have 15 film collections that can be found at at this part of their site if you just want to browse. I particularly like the Animated Films (1900-1921) myself!