https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2007/nr07-122....
For all the helpful advice offered both here and on Reddit about how to do this, I wish there had been more time asking if this was something the OP should be doing in the first place.
I completely understand the frustration if this is indeed the above set of films and it's been over eleven years since the digitization agreement and files have not yet been made freely available to the public.
That said, planning to use a researcher's pass to "set these treasures free" and blaming Amazon for not having generated more revenue from these films makes it sound like the OP thinks he knows better than the staff of the National Archives how to best care for these assets and that he knows better than the folks at Amazon how to turn a profit. To me, it sounds more than a little arrogant.
A big reason the National Archives enters into agreements like this with companies is that digitization, especially on their scale, is expensive. If it weren't for agreements like this, Amazon would only want to digitize the films for which they knew they could turn a profit and the vast majority of the collection would sit un-digitized and be at risk of loss. The tradeoff is between the immediacy of access vs the number of assets digitized and the team at NARA made the decision that it was better for the American people to have more assets digitized.
I'm worried that the next time NARA is in talks with someone about a digitization agreement (for example, if there's a large number of early jazz audio recordings on 1/4" reels and Spotify is interesting in paying the cost of digitization in exchange for 2-3 years of exclusivity) that the company will point to this example and say "didn't you just let a researcher publish the entire collection Amazon digitized? How can you assure us the same thing won't happen with these recordings?" The result will be the National Archives clamping down on researcher access. I think that would be a net loss for everyone.
Since amazon was only looking to get its investment back, but not a profit, then clearly the intent of both parties was to eventually have it release to the public. Whoever on amazon’s side pushed the deal presumably thought they would be sold, but it clearly didn’t happen. It’s much more likely this has been sitting on a backburner somewhere, left as some forgotten plan, than some kind of long-term strategy to induce sales.
Thus, by virtue of an ill-written contract, we’ve entered a situation that no one wants. Amaxon no longer cares about it, the museum presumably prefers releasing it, and the public can only benefit from it.
By virtue of that same contract, there’s an escape hatch that might bring us back to a state where everyone is content.
It would make sense to exploit it.
Ofc, this is assuming Amazon doesn’t care. But amazon is a company, and the larger a company is, the less distinguishable it is from a government. And governments certainly have control over things it has collectively forgotten about, as it only rarely operates a single, like-minded, cooperative organism.
And amazon is indeed a very large company. It would hardly be unsurprising for Amazon to not even be aware this contract still exists.
Or maybe the National Archives will stop making deals where free distribution of the material is unlikely to happen for decades and will instead open up greater access to researchers.
Or they could make the same deals but put a deadline on them to prevent the exclusivity from sitting in limbo forever. That would at least give Amazon an incentive to distribute the material rather than just squatting on its monopoly.
And yet there are researchers willing to do this quickly and for free, so why do we even need Amazon in the loop?
> The flipside of the catch is that the DVDs can be viewed and even copied for $0 on site by researchers. I am doing research there and I have have a research pass. I was looking at many of these titles yesterday. It’s time to set these national treasures free.
-- https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/a6fkpm/i_have_...
GP was just wondering out loud about the content itself, not the format of said content.