Wednesday 17 February 2010

International Amateur Scanning League

Carl Malamud at Public Resource.org announced that the inaugural meeting of the International Amateur Scanning League took place Feb. 11 at the Sunlight Foundation. The League is is an experiment in volunteer-based crowd-sourced digitization to help government and other institutions make their archives more widely available. The first project involves the National Archives & Records Administration which has over 1,500 DVDs that are works of the government and can be freely copied using a DVD duplicator. NARA is allowing the installation of a DVD duplicator for use of Scanning League members, who will systematically copy those 1,500 DVDs and send them to Public.Resource.Org, where they can be uploaded to the Internet Archive and YouTube. Malamud says "What makes this grassroots digitization effort so remarkable is that it has the full support of the government. Indeed, David Ferriero, the U.S. Archivist, joined me in the initial meeting where we taught volunteers how to rip DVDs!"

hat tip: law librarian blog

No comments: