One person's collection serves that one person, but there are some really cool groups out there like DocuWiki[0] that try to archive every documentary out there and serve them on the eDonkey network. There's been numerous times I've failed to find a documentary by even the original publisher. Like I literally couldn't give them my money no matter how much I tried. And even libraries didn't have it. But good old DocuWiki always had my back

Torrents are kind of like a community archive

[0] https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Special:Newpages