Personalized Information Libraries : Video Archives

( Via Siliconbeat) Michael Bazeley speaks to Internet Archive co-founder Brewster Kahle, shares details about the San Francisco organization's growing collection of video files. The Archive collects video files from the public. Virtually anyone can submit a video to the library, and the chances are pretty good they'll archive it. "Our offer is for anyone with material that broadly belongs in a library and they're willing to share,'' Kahle said. In essence, the IA has become a free video hosting service of sorts, no small matter considering the bandwidth and storage costs associated with video.
The driver for storing life’s moments in the archive is,” What seems irrelevant now may be very important to someone else years from now”.. (Kahle and the Archive are also working with a group called Ourmedia that hopes to build a repository of grassroots media, including photo albums, video diaries, home-brew political ads and student films.)
"We're starting to move to the point of having personalized information libraries,'' he said. But selection is often more expensive than storing the information. Making a decision about whether to select something is often more expensive than just grabbing it.'' The IA is taking in about 100 videos a day, Kahle said. Each one is screened by an IA employee before it's archived and made available on the Web. If the coming years see an explosion in videoblogging and grassroots media, as expected, that could become an unwieldy task. But Kahle seems unconcerned, speaking as if he and his 20 employees are duty-bound as librarians to preserve history. "If you take the rules that libraries play by, we do the same thing. We put content on the shelves and we invite the public to look at. That's what's libraries do. But we're a digital one.''