International Amateur Scanning League

An article about scanning that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times caught my eye. Reading it, I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t about scanning paper; it was about scanning DVDs. This effort is being organized by the International Amateur Scanning League which has as its goal making thousands of hours of non-copyright video produced by agencies of the federal government freely available online through sites such as YouTube and the Internet Archive. In an interesting and very positive twist, the government is fully supporting this private volunteer effort which is doing its scanning at the main National Archives facility just outside Washington DC in nearby Maryland. Leaders of IASL refer to this as “an experiment in crowd-sourced digitization.”

With broadband internet giving most of the country a high speed connection to the web and with the cost of digital storage down to almost nothing, now is the time to convert massive amounts of analog and paper records to digital form. This story gives an innovative example of how a large volume of material can be scanned using volunteer labor – crowd-sourcing, as it’s called. It’s a technique that more governmental entities should consider trying.