> Years ago in partnership with the National Archives Amazon.com digitized a tremendous amount of film for the National Archives, with the catch that the material cannot be freely disseminated online by the National Archives until Amazon breaks even on their digitization investment. It’s been years now and for a variety of reasons - many of which are Amazon’s fault - there still exist a solid number of discs that Amazon hasn’t sold even one of. (In part because amazon hasn’t even had them all available to sell. Pretty ridiculous).
> The flipside of the catch is that the DVDs can be viewed and even copied for $0 on site by researchers. I am doing research there and I have have a research pass. I was looking at many of these titles yesterday. It’s time to set these national treasures free.
A little off-topic, but it's interesting to see the shift in meaning of the "reel of film" icon over the decades; a long time ago, it would signify any video, but now it's more associated with an actual cinema film.
> The flipside of the catch is that the DVDs can be viewed and even copied for $0 on site by researchers. I am doing research there and I have have a research pass. I was looking at many of these titles yesterday. It’s time to set these national treasures free.
-- https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/a6fkpm/i_have_...