Nifty resource, and cheaper than a trip to DC

I read this weekend that the U.S. National Archives and Google have teamed up to digitize and make National Archives holdings available free to all online. This means anyone with a computer can now have access to historic movies, documentaries, and other films in the Archives.

You can check Archives' holdings at the official National Archives website as well as at a Google website. At the moment, the pilot program covers 101 films, including some U.S. government World War II newsreels; several NASA documentaries on the history of the spaceflight program; and some documentaries on the history and establishment of a nationwide system of national and state parks, Boulder Dam, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The kids and I took a look through the links and found the following gems (the download takes too long for us dial-up types, but one can hope):

• Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima

• "The Eagle Has Landed", about the 1969 moon landing

• "Who's Out There", a 1975 exploration of extraterrestrial life narrated by Orson Welles, which made me realize that someone at NASA had a sense of humor
  

• the swearing-in of Harry S Truman as President

Even better news: the National Archives and Google are considering the possibility of expanding the current online collection -- which at the moment includes the Declaration of Independence, the 1918 influenza epidemic, 20th century photographs and photographers, the meeting of Nixon and Elvis, and much, much more -- and making the Archives' extensive textual holdings available on the internet. Yahoo! Er, I mean Google!