House Oversight Committee + Carl Malamud have released 1,139 Committee Videos dating back to 1994
Submitted by jajacobs on Fri, 2012-01-06 16:22.
Watching Them Watching: Issa Touts Video Archive of Oversight Hearings, by Nick Judd, TechPresident (January 6 2012).
As of today, the House Committee on Government Oversight under Rep. Darrell Issa has released 1,139 videos of hearings going back to the 103rd Congress of 1993-1994, committee staff announced today.
These videos, dusted off from the House committee's archives, join hundreds more going all the way back to 1987 on House.Resource.org, a repository for archived video and hearing transcripts gleaned from C-SPAN, the House and the Internet Archive as part of a collaboration between Carl Malamud's Public.Resource.org and House Speaker John Boehner. At the start of this Congress, Boehner asked Issa's Oversight committee — which had been recording its own video of hearings, doubling up on video already recorded by the House Broadcasting Studio, since the 2010-2011 session of Congress — to take on archiving and publicising video of committee hearings as a pilot project. The House this year also launched its own streaming of floor proceedings.
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archiving house.resource.org
Hey James, hope y'all are well. I've been asked about the possibility of archiving some of these in Georgia Southern University's institutional repository. Is there any sort of coordinated effort to determine who's archiving them and where? Or do you think that the Internet Archive & other sources are going to archive them perpetually so that any other archives would only be mirroring them?
building local collections of House videos
Jonathan,
Over at house.resource.org, it says that the videos are already at the Internet Archive:
I sent a message to govdoc-l last week asking if anyone was adding some or all of these videos to their local digital collections, if anyone was building collections around Congressional Representatives, or a time period, or issue. I haven't heard back yet, but will post here if and when I do.
It would, of course be great if some libraries did get copies. I would love to see libraries do more than mirror the contents, too. If libraries build their own collections, they can customize the organization and finding aids and interface to their collections to fit the needs of their own community. And they can integrate these videos and transcripts in with other materials in their collection to provide a better user-experience and make it easier for their users to find what they need.
I would guess that IA and resource.org intend to keep these online for as long as they can. But I would hope for 2 things:
1. That the library community would assist in this and get copies now that they can curate for as long as they want and not hope that someone else will do this for them.
2. That (1) can be accomplished (at least partly) by libraries creating their own smaller collections from this larger collection by selecting videos based on topic or time period or Representative or other criteria that are relevant to each library's own user community.
Let FGI know if you are doing something!
-- jim
I bet IA would help to batch export
Hi Jonathan. Thanks to my colleague Jim Jacobs (yes there are two of us here at FGI!) for the quick response. I second Jim's hope that libraries will decide to collect and host these videos in their local digital repositories. It's a great way to build local digital collections of interest to your local user community -- and we all know that lots of copies keep stuff safe!! Do keep us posted if you decide to do that. We'd love to hear what and how you did it. And let me know also if you need a contact at Internet Archive. They're very close by :-)
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