I'm writing to announce a launch of a new public project, the Internet
Moving Images Archive. The Archive is a nonprofit initiative to open and
promote film and video archives to the public by making their holdings
freely available.
This non-commercial resource contains high-quality digital video files
representing ephemeral (advertising, educational, industrial, documentary,
amateur and government) films relevant to the study of 20th-century
American culture and society, media and media production, communication,
technology, geography, landscape, urban history, economics, political
science, warfare, the New Deal, and many other subject areas.
At present it contains approximately 360 out of a planned total of 1001
titles, all from Prelinger Archives. All are available for free
downloading and reuse, with no restrictions other than that the films
cannot be resold or licensed by anyone in their entirety or as stock
footage. Our intention is that these titles should circulate freely as
"open-source" content.
I encourage you to download this material for your own use and for the use
of others. I hope that easy access to these films will assist scholars,
mediamakers, teachers, students, exhibitors and members of the general
public in coming to terms with the complex and diverse audiovisual history
of the 20th century.
You'll need a fast connection, as the digitized video files are in MPEG-2
format and quite large. However, they look great, and will play back on a
regular TV screen as well on your computer. (See the site for information
on playback and tech requirements). In the next few months they will also
be available in MPEG-4, a friendlier format for lower-bandwidth users.
At present, the best way to reach the site is through my own homepage at
http://www.prelinger.com. Ultimately, the simplified URL will be
http://www.moviearchive.org.
An article on the background and rationale for this project may be found at
http://eserver.org/bs/52/prelinger.html.
The Internet Moving Images Archive is a project of the Internet Archive
(http://www.archive.org) in collaboration with Prelinger Archives
(http://www.prelinger.com).
With many thanks,
Rick Prelinger
Rick Prelinger
Prelinger Archives http://www.prelinger.com
P.O. Box 590622, San Francisco, Calif. 94159-0622
+1 415 750-0445 Fax: +1 415 750-0607
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