This appeared on the AMIA listserv. This is an interesting endeavor and another source for public domain titles. Regards, Jane
Jane B. Hutchison Associate Director Instruction & Research Technology 300 Pompton Road Wayne, NJ 07470 (w)973-720-2980 (cell) 973-418-7727 -----Original Message----- From: Association of Moving Image Archivists [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Skip Elsheimer Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 11:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [AMIA-L] A/V Geeks is uploading new films to the Internet every day in August! Hey folks, Here's details regarding a digitizing campaign that we've taken on for the summer. We've gotten over 70 films online so far! ---------------------------------- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Raleigh, NC - August 12, 2012 A/V Geeks is uploading new films to the Internet every day in August! Public domain films, previously unavailable, for free access! Fundraising campaign to digitize 100 miles of film by August 31st The A/V Geeks, owners of one of the largest collections of 16mm arts and education films in the world (24,000 and counting), are on a mission to digitize public domain films and make them freely available on the internet. Our films have been seen by millions on The Colbert Report, MTV 2's Wonder Showzen, Mad Men, PBS, The History Channel and many other outlets. After years of digitizing films for NASA and the Internet Archive, A/V Geeks is now attempting to upload 100 miles of lost 16mm screen gems during the month of August. Every day during the month of August, we are adding new copyright-free films to YouTube, and are collecting them at http://av-geeks.tumblr.com/, for anyone to watch, download, research or repurpose for their own creative projects. Many of these lost cultural artifacts haven't been seen by human eyes in decades! They include gems like Attack, a 1966 self-defense film for women, Any Boy USA, a 1953 delight in which a rumpled Mr. Whiskey shows a little boy what life in the big city is really like, Adventures In Telezonia (1949), which uses marionettes to teach dialing a rotary telephone, Quality Milk (1930), one of the earliest films in the collection, a USDA film aimed at dairy farmers, and Bag 5 (1966), a fascinating compilation of kid-produced animations. Crowd-Funding, Crowd-Pleasing A/V Geeks want to digitize and make available 100 miles (over 240 hours) of public domain film from their archive during the month of August. To allocate the time, equipment and resources needed to catalog, curate, prep, clean, digitize, post-process, upload and share 100 miles of films, we need to raise $50,000 and have set up an Indiegogo fundraiser at http://www.indiegogo.com/avgeeks100miles. For every $35 contribution, 10 minutes of lost 16mm footage will be made available for the world to enjoy. There are perks, of course. Those who donate can help pick films to digitize and get stickers, DVDs, a new t-shirt, an A/V Geeks screening at your event, and more! The campaign ends August 31, 2012. For more information, contact Skip Elsheimer, founder and curator of the A/V Geeks educational film archive, at [email protected] or visit www.avgeeks.com. During the past two decades, Skip has rescued over 24,000 films that were destined for landfills or hidden away in basements and school closets. The films now live on shelves in 8 rooms within his home, a former boarding house he shares with his wife in Raleigh, NC. "I'm happy to save the films," says Elsheimer, "but more than that I want people to watch them, make new connections, restore their relevancy to today's culture and then share them with more people." "When we share these old films on the internet, magical things happen. We've heard from filmmakers excited to see their work getting new attention, actors who appeared in the films but never saw them, and historians looking for moving images of places, events and people they've only read about." Skip Elsheimer A/V Geeks LLC www.avgeeks.com 919-247-7752 VIDEOLIB is intended to encourage the broad and lively discussion of issues relating to the selection, evaluation, acquisition,bibliographic control, preservation, and use of current and evolving video formats in libraries and related institutions. It is hoped that the list will serve as an effective working tool for video librarians, as well as a channel of communication between libraries,educational institutions, and video producers and distributors.
