IT and society: International Amateur Scanning League

The inaugural meeting of the International Amateur Scanning League was mounted on February 11, 2010. 

The meeting took place at the Sunlight Foundation (an educational organization founded with the goal of increasing transparency in the US Congress, which encourages citizens by aggregating existing information and digitizing new information). Among the special guests of the meeting was the Honorable David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and senior staff members of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The NARA facility in College Park, Maryland has a wealth of information available to researchers, including over 1,500 DVDs that are works of the government and can be freely copied using a DVD duplicator. NARA allowed the League to install a second DVD duplicator for use of Scanning League members, who will systematically copy those 1,500 DVDs, and send them back to Public.Resource.Org. These DVDs will then be uploaded to the Internet Archive, YouTube. These 1,500 new videos will join over 1,300 videos currently on-line that have had several million views and were the result of a joint venture with the National Technical Information Service as well as from numerous other government agencies who sent us tapes and DVDs.

The International Amateur Scanning League is an experiment in crowd-sourced digitization to help government and other institutions make their archives more widely available.