A/V Geeks has done a lot of digitization of old film for The Internet Archive. They are trying to raise funds to digitize many more hours of footage to put up on archive.org which will be free to view and use by the public. If you would like to contribute here is some information:

http://www.indiegogo.com/avgeeks100miles

WHAT? The A/V Geeks have over 24,000 old 16mm educational films that we’ve rescued from landfills, dumpsters, closets, school libraries. These films cover topics from Atomic Bombs to Zoo Babies and provide an entertaining yet insightful glimpse into our past. We’ve kept these materials from being thrown out and we want to continue our mission by giving them a new life and sharing them you!

Traditionally, this means that we would have to either travel to you or you would have to travel to us to watch a film on a projector. By digitizing these films we can give you and the world access to these materials! When a film from the A/V Geeks archive is digitized and uploaded to the internet, it can be easily accessed, watched, downloaded, researched and repurposed for music videos, class projects, documentaries and more.

Help us digitize 100 Miles of Film! Instead of traveling miles to give access to these films we’d rather digitize miles of 16mm film. Film length is generally measured in feet (in the US) to where 2100 feet of film roughly equals one hour of content. With your support we can digitize and make available 100 miles of film – over 240 hours of (around 1,000 individual titles) from the archive. So we envision this as sort of a road rally. We have to go 100 miles in a short period of time. We’ll have a small team to keep the machines humming along. We aren’t sure what we’ll find with some of the films – we haven’t seen them yet!

For every $500 we raise, we digitize one mile of film (nearly 2.5 hours of material)!