The Daily Background

This is very cool: this past week the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston announced it has become the first of the presidential libraries to put a major portion of its holdings online. This includes documents, photos, audio recordings, and (yes!) even full-length public domain video with accompanying shot lists. All four are of interest to me, coming from a documentary filmmaking background (though I don’t have any specific interest in making a film about Kennedy).

Personally I think they’re missing a tremendous opportunity by not providing a download button for the video (as well as the documents and images and audio), but people will find ways to rip them anyway. The quality isn’t really usable for any serious professional purposes, but this is a damn cool tool for documentary research and free low quality archival screener material. Hopefully they are telecine-ing the films at a decent enough quality that they have full-resolution digital masters lying around on hard drives for filmmakers who want them and are willing to pay a nominal fee.

They say they plan to digitize an additional 100,000 more items per year (though at this rate it will take more than 100 years to put everything online!). Hopefully other presidential libraries and major archives will follow their lead and put their materials available online as well.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog