In April 2009, the Library of Congress launched a pilot project on the online video portal YouTube to offer selected items from its collections of early motion pictures, along with recordings of Library-sponsored events, lectures and concerts. Through this pilot, the Library -- home to over 1.2 million film, television, and video items -- is sharing items from the Library’s collections with people who enjoy video but might not visit the Library’s own Web site (similar to one the goals of our Flickr pilot, which focused on photographs.)
To view the video on YouTube, go to the Library of Congress channel at: http://www.youtube.com/loc. You do not need a YouTube account to watch or embed the videos you find there; you would need to sign up for a free account to subscribe to the channel. All Library content that can be accessed on our YouTube channel is available on the Library of Congress web site, loc.gov; which is always the primary source for our digitized collections.
The Library’s YouTube channel features a variety of video presentations to introduce the YouTube community to the breadth of online video content available from the Library. We launched with 6 playlists on the YouTube channel: historic films from the American Memory collection, and a variety of Library Webcasts, including author presentations from 2008 National Book Festival and the Center for the Book Books and Beyond series, curator discussions from the Journeys and Crossings series and lectures by John W. Kluge Center scholars. Look for more playlists in the future as additional video from these and other collections are added each month.
View postings and comments relating to the YouTube pilot on the Library of Congress blog: April 7, 2009.
The Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division oversees one of the largest collections of motion pictures in the world and the Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center acquires, preserves and provides access to those collections. See American Memory Motion Pictures Collections to browse a list of digitized items for viewing.
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