...every time Liz Pruszko presses the start button on a DVD [duplicating] machine, she knows she is helping to unlock the thousands of videos tucked away in the National Archives.
"It just seems like such a shame to not have this content out there," Ms. Pruszko said.
When she says "out there," she is talking about the Web, where it might seem that every conceivable video clip of federal importance is already stored, just waiting to be searched for. That is far from true. But she is nudging the government in that direction.
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."
What a great thing! These guys ROCK. Of course, they also deserve a salary to do this intensely boring work--I should know, I've been converting over my DVD collection to mp4 over the past five years :\
I wish there was some way I could help--but it sounds like it's impossible unless you live in DC.
Hit that NYTimes.com link for more on this cool group!
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