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International Amateur Scanning League
The NARA facility in College Park, Maryland has a wealth of information available to researchers, including over 1,500 DVDs that are works of the government and can be freely copied using a DVD duplicator. NARA is kindly allowing us to install a second DVD duplicator for use of Scanning League members, who will systematically copy those 1,500 DVDs, place them in a FedFlix return envelope, and send them back to Public.Resource.Org. These DVDs will then be uploaded to the Internet Archive, YouTube, and our own Public Domain Stock Footage Library. These 1,500 new videos will join over 1,300 videos currently on-line that have had several million views and were the result of a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service as well as from numerous other government agencies who sent us tapes and DVDs.
The International Amateur Scanning League is an experiment in crowd-sourced digitization to help government and other institutions make their archives more widely available. Volunteers will be given credit for their work in the on-line metadata, will receive cool tchotchkes, and will be eligible to display Public Domain Merit Badges upon completion of designated levels of service.
There are a variety of models for public-private partnerships. It is our hope that the International Amateur Scanning League will pave the way for a host of new initiatives that will help us all make the public domain more accessible by crowd-sourcing digitization of government archives. These efforts are not meant to replace private sector efforts, and certainly do not alleviate the need for government to step up their own digitization initiatives, such as the establishment of a National Scan Center.
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WASHINGTON, D.C.—Public.Resource.Org is pleased to announce that the inaugural
meeting of the International Amateur Scanning League is taking place February 11, 2010.
The meeting is taking place at the
The initial group of volunteers was the result of an organizing effort
by 
As part of the inaugural meeting of the IASL, a variety of very cool
tchotchkes and support materials are being made available to volunteers,
including stickers from CafePress, DVD transmittal forms from MOO,
FedFlix return envelopes from ActionEnvelopes, posters from Zazzle,
banners from Vistaprint, and brochures from QOOP. When citizens help
make works of the government more broadly available, this leads not only
to increased access by the public but a host of commercial opportunities
for print-on-demand, DVD sales, and other value-added operations.
The extremely cool artwork for this launch, including the Public
Domain Merit Badges, the FedFlix logo, and the IASL logo, were all
created by
Comments: 5
Nahum Gershon [11 February 2010 08:30 AM]
This is a great idea that potentially will benefit us all. I live in the DC area and used on-site NARA services in the past, so in that sense, compared with citizens in far-away locations, I'm spoiled. This public-private partnership in scanning NARA documents will help bringing the information to everybody, everywhere, and at any time.
I am in particular excited about this partnership since it will involve the public in preserving the information and furthermore, it will help foster the creation of new information from the old.
Murray A. Valenstein [15 March 2010 09:33 AM]
Is there an index listing by topic of DVD's already downloaded to NARA and available for purchase?
Robert H. Williams [18 March 2010 01:45 AM]
Great project!
I'm hoping that something similar can be brought
about to deal with public access to laws (state and federal) policies and the like. Surprisingly it is still very difficult to bring together say, the FMLA or something of the sort from its various sources. Although openly available, in cases such as this a citizen must scour the Federal Register, state law, and other sources to get it all together in one usable piece! Far simpler would be a mandate to publish, scan and distribute everything in .pdf, .doc and .txt , *complete* in one easily accessible format so a person could then download it and use it for whatever purpose.
Not every citizen can make multiple trips to a law library, use (pay big member fees) for services like Lexis/Nexis and such. In any event, great job, and thanks very much.
Have A Healthy, Prosperous Day!
---Robert
Rain [ 7 July 2010 07:55 AM]
Thank you very much for your work. It is great that you are doing suc a good thing for people who are eager to know more and also that you put so much efforts to make your organization so large. I wonder if there is any chance that you will ever work with vinyl records. I like them so much. As for me, I'm fond of music. I usually download a lot from music search http://mp3hunting.com but there isn't there old records which would play as they did it 50 years ago. And it is a pity that we will never hear that old pleasant sound.
objectifargent [ 2 October 2010 03:03 AM]
Is there an index listing by topic of DVD's already downloaded to NARA and available for purchase?