Library of Congress Shares Nation’s Treasures on YouTube
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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 3/31/2009
The Library of Congress (LC) has begun distributing portions of its vast audio and video collections—including 100-year-old films from the Thomas Edison studio—on YouTube and Apple’s iTunes.The nation’s oldest federal cultural institution is greatly expanding the digital distribution of its collections after the U.S. General Services Administration announced a deal last week with several video sharing and social networking sites after six months of talks.
LC had already been distributing thousands of historic photographs on photo-sharing site Flickr as part of a two-year pilot project. (Pictured is the 1911 opening of the New York Public Library.) Now, the Library and every other government agency can use YouTube, Vimeo, and New York-based startup blip.tv to distribute video and audio. First-person accounts of slavery and interviews with notable authors are among the treasures now available on LC’s YouTube channel.
YouTube streamed more than 5.3 billion videos in the U.S. alone in February and accounts for 40 percent of all video views on the Web, according to measurement firm comScore. YouTube is also a powerhouse search engine, the second largest after Google.
Students and educators may also be able to upload LC clips on their own sites or blogs, although YouTube allows content owners to turn off the embedding functionality. Calls to LC staff to clarify that point were not returned. We’ll know soon enough. The LC plans to start uploading collections “within the next few weeks.”
If it’s anything like the Flickr initiative, LC will upload content incrementally, as staff resources allow. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in a statement that the new agreements “remove many of the impediments to making our unparalleled content more useful to many more people.”
