Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Images Of The Past: National Archives Film Library/Citizen Archivist Program

National Archives
National Archives Building in Washington, D.C.

In The Moment … December 7, 2020 Show 955 Hour 1

The Declaration of Independence and America's other founding documents are in the care of the National Archives and Records Administration, but our nation's founding documents are only just the very tip of a very large repository of archived documents and other records.

The National Archives Motion Picture Preservation Lab of the National Archives and Records Administration has recently digitized a large number of historical films and made them available online. The "library stock shots" archive contains 428 reels of film produced mostly during the 1930s and 1940s. Many of the films are of high quality and the range of subjects is broad. As of December 2020, about 398 of the 428 reels have been digitized and catalogued.

Joining us today is Heidi Holmstrom, a Motion Picture Preservation Specialist at the National Archives where she works in the Motion Picture Preservation Lab - she happens to be a native of Vermillion - and Ben Petersen, the National Archives Digital Partnerships and Outreach Director. His team runs the Archives' Citizen Archivist program, a volunteer crowdsourcing program that helps empower the public to tag, transcribe and comment on digitized historic records in the National Archives Catalog.

Blog Post: Searchable Stock Shots: 306-LSS Films Now Online!

Online video tutorials, & The National Archives Catalog, containing over 128 million digitized pages of records. View all the digital video files in the National Archives Catalog (Heidi mentions this one during the interview). 

Find the In the Moment Podcast on Apple, Spotify, and Google Play. Plus, watch interviews from our show on YouTube.