Live Video Streaming. From Your Local Library.

The US Library of Congress is quite adept at bringing the latest technological trends into its realm and realities.

In the past, they’ve been critical, for instance, of the current copyright regulations, reporting that those rules, as they currently stand, actually get in the way of them performing their appointed tasks.

This week they announced that they’re looking at direct video streaming of content that they hold. This is entirely consistent with their stated mission of providing access to the public of their collection of books, media, and the like.

In this case, they’re looking at ways to provide access to selections from the National Film Registry. This is a great idea, and I hope that it spreads.

I would love to see some of the contents of our National Film and Sound Archive, held at FilmSound in Canberra, made available to the public via streaming. This would make these collections much more widely accessible.

And can you think of a better way to use some of the bandwidth that our NBN will be giving us than by educating our people with the content that this sort of resource could provide, without the requirement of having to travel to Canberra? For many people, that’s simply not an option, but streaming this content, in the future, would be just perfect.