This is a well known story for documents librarians, but this is a good telling of the tale. It has the added benefit of being timely what with all that is going on about C-SPAN (see: C-SPAN provides more access, but wants to retain control). It includes links to Click.TV and Metavid (an open-source effort at UC-Santa Cruz that “has been building an impressive online archive of all the House and Senate floor proceedings from January 2006 forward”) and more:
- The Imaginary Adventures of the U.S. Senate: Sorting fact from fiction in the Congressional Record by Jesse Walker, Reason March 8, 2007
What all this interest in video of Congress may lead to (and many of us would like to see it!) is an “open-source” version of the Congressional Record — a transcript of what is actually said in Congress. It would make an excellent complement to the official CR. But this is hard to do now, because, as the Metavid folks discovered when they asked the government for transcripts, “the government wasn’t willing to provide them with a pre-edited version of the daily Record.” More Control of Information: your tax dollars at work! 🙁
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