[WikiEN-l] At least it's not *just* YouTube...

[Gwern Branwen]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/technology/15fedflix.html
"Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive"

"Ms. Pruszko is a volunteer for the International Amateur Scanning
League, an invention of the longtime public information advocate Carl
Malamud. The league plans to upload the archives’ collection of 3,000
DVDs in what Mr. Malamud calls an “experiment in crowd-sourced
digitization.”
Armed with nothing but a DVD duplicator and a YouTube account, the
volunteers have copied and uploaded, among other video clips, an
address by John F. Kennedy; a silent film about the Communist “red
scare”; a training video on farming; and a Disney film for World War
II soldiers about how to avoid malaria, in Spanish. So far, nothing
elusive has emerged — but the project is in its infancy.
...
In red envelopes labeled “FedFlix,” his DVD-by-mail variation on
Netflix, the volunteers mail the DVD copies to Mr. Malamud’s home in
Northern California, where he uploads them to YouTube, the Internet
Archive Web site and an independent server. Mr. Malamud said that the
volunteer work hardly reduces the need for the government to increase
its own digitization efforts."

-- 
gwern