Friday, November 19, 2004

Archive.org rocks!

"The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public."

What a truly amazing site. Public domain movies (great industrials and propaganda). A massive live music archive. You have a band? You can put your live shows there. The archive, to give one example, is a great source of live Grateful Dead shows from 1966-1995. For The Grateful Dead alone, they have 2,774 shows online, or roughly 6,000+ hours of live Dead music. You can download a two-three hour show in seven minutes. There are shows by Little Feat, Cracker, Bela Fleck and many other people and bands.

Want to hear the Kennedy-Nixon debates? They're all there. Hear Lindbergh, and FDR, and the secret tapes of LBJ and Robert McNamara discussing the war in SE Asia.

The archive also includes the entire Prelinger Archives (by Rick Prelinger in NYC). From 1983 to 2003, it grew to a collection of over 48,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. It includes a lot of wonderful instructional films about dating, weird industrials, duck and cover movies, and on and on. Check out the movies Breakfast Pals, Are You Popular, Your Name Here, or The Shy Guy, starring the fellow who played Samantha's husband on Bewitched...

This is an amazing web site. You could waste a lot of time here. /jack




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