The Internet Archive

Internet Archive (IA)! In 1996, IA released its “Wayback Machine,” the first webcrawler designed to copy and archive websites in flux, a great tool that may prove very important and useful in future research as we begin to recognize the unique character of sites that change fluidly month to month, year to year (they’ve got about 85 billion webpages so far). But the Wayback Machine’s just one of the organizations involved in the IA’s efforts to compile audio, texts, software, and moving images as well.
The one I’m actually most familiar with is the Prelinger Archives, an organization whose online database is located at IA. The Prelinger Archives specialize in collecting and sharing what they call “ephemeral” films: corporate instructional films, amateur film, advertisements (the sorts of obscure footage that gets dug up for so many documentaries). The video below is posted along with all their other videos on the site and gives a good overview of the aims and history of the project (it also has a pretty well-chosen mix of the variety they provide). What’s most interesting to me about the project is how they’ve put most of their footage into the digital public domain using *creative commons* licenses and encouraged individuals to download and use the footage in whatever way they want. So check it out. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. IA has a ton of other contributors which are also worth looking at (and posting on, this post should by no means exhaust the whole Internet Archive).
Here’s the video (I tried embedding it, but it didn't seem to be working).

-Aidan