Author Archives: footage

Books In Browsers 2010 Day 2

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Bob Stein, If:Book

9:05  Bob Stein of If:Book Bob Stein of If:Book showing the value of the conversation around books and how this has been proven in previous generations.

9:39 Richard Nash, ThinkCursor.com, on how discoverability begins with the writer.  Writers! yay!

Richard Nash, Cursor Books

10:18 Kovid Goyal of Calibre is up now giving a demo of their opensource booksharing.

So, during lunch we had a fire brigade with a bunch the attendees helping to haul 57 boxes of hard drives upstairs. These drives total 2.88 petabytes of memory, 288,000,ooo gigabytes…enough for about 2 billion books (see photo below). Whew and yay!

Kovid Goyal of Calibre

2.88 petabytes - 288,000,000GB

The 2.88 petabyte brigade

I’ll have some more images up later.

Right now it’s a wrap and there’s wine opened so I’ll be back later….

-Jeff Kaplan

Robert Altman's early career

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The Magic BondRobert Altman has died at 81.

He began his career working at Kansas City, Missouri’s famed industrial film factory, the Calvin Company. As one of the Archive’s knowledgeable posters, “Mr.,” states, he made a number of sponsored films before his first feature, The Delinquents.

The Magic Bond, his 1955 film for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, is downloadable from the Archive. Does the first sequence remind you of a certain movie about the Korean War?

Remembering Sid Davis

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Age 13 (Part I) (1955)Sid Davis, chronicler of childhood menace and jeopardy, has died at 90.

Sid was one of the most distinctive independent filmmakers who entered the nontheatrical film field following World War II. Throughout his career, he expressed concern for the safety and wellbeing of children and teenagers, making some 150 films (the exact total is hard to determine) that rank among the most compelling cautionary works of the 20th century. Though he was a Hollywood insider and worked as John Wayne’s stand-in, he was a self-taught filmmaker, and his films look quite unlike anyone else’s.
There are 25 of his films online at the IA.

His obituary is here and here, and a Metafilter post here.

Election Day in the U.S.

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Behind the Freedom Curtain (1957)While you wait for the results, check out two films from the Prelinger collection:

Tuesday in November (1945), a U.S. Office of War Information production, shows the election process and argues that American democracy is so robust that we can put on a free and highly contested election even in wartime. John Houseman made this film with Nicholas Ray’s assistance. Unfortunately not well known, this film is a landmark of idealist documentary film. Our copy is made from a beat-up 16mm distribution print and could be better, but the good news is that plans are afoot to preserve this film once and for all.

Behind the Freedom Curtain (1957) is a promo for the Automatic Voting Machine Co. of Jamestown, N.Y., explaining how mechanical voting machines count every vote fairly and make it impossible to steal elections.

U.S. residents, vote early and often!

And Thanksgiving's creeping up, too

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Let’s Talk TurkeyOne of many great films made by the Centron folks in Lawrence, Kansas, A Day of Thanksgiving (1951) tells the story of a working-class family who can’t afford a holiday turkey dinner. Instead of stuffing themselves, they decide to think about what they’re thankful for. Unlike most Cold War films, this one doesn’t link freedom and happiness with the pursuit of material gain.

For more practical advice, cruise over to Let’s Talk Turkey (also 1951), which is full of kitchen suggestions that the Internet Archive does not endorse.