Internet Archive Moving Image Archive

The Internet Archive, an ongoing digital remembrance and retrieval project, has many sections - one of which is the Moving Image Archive, a vast library of free movies, films, and videos dating from as early as the 1800s. You'll find all sorts of interesting multimedia here, anything from Private Snuffy Smith to Twilight Zone Sponsor ID's and Bumpers to A Star Is Born.

The Moving Image Archive is organized into roughly a dozen categories ranging from Animation to Sports Videos. Click on any of these categories, and you'll see a list of sub-categories/collections. For example, if you click on the Cultural & Academic Films, one of the collections you'll see is the Academic Film Archive of North America. Click on THAT link, and you'll see 77 different films nicely organized by subject and keyword. All of the categories are organized in this easy to navigate style, which makes it pretty simple to find something you'll be interested in.

In addition to browsing the categories, you can also check out the most recent additions to the Moving Image Archive, a great way to get a first look at what's new, or the most downloaded movies of the week - see what everyone else is downloading.

There's also a simple keyword search in the box at the top of the page, but if all else fails, you can try the Advanced Search. This is a pretty detailed search form, but there are directions at the bottom of the page that will take you step by step.

Every video at the Moving Image Archive is playable right in your browser - just click on the play button. However, if you want to download a movie to your computer, download information is available just to the left of every movie and video's individual page, and there are a variety of file formats available - and if you need help, the Moving Image Archive has a detailed tutorial you can read.

The Moving Image Archive is, in a word, amazing. You can find the most interesting multimedia resources here without much effort, and new ones are added constantly. I highly recommend it.

There's a lot to look at at the Internet Archive's Moving Image Archive, including:

• Most Downloaded Items Last Week: This gives you a quick glimpse at what other Web searchers are most interested in, as well as a handy way to tell which multimedia items are actually available to download.
• Most Downloaded Items: Similar to above, except this list looks at the most popular Moving Image Archive downloads over a longer period of time.
• This Just In: The most recently added multimedia items.

Halfway down the main Moving Image page is the list of Sub-Collections; these are subject genres ranging from Animation & Cartoons to Cultural & Academic Films, all organized into more sub-collections with similar stratification as detailed above (most downloaded, most popular, etc.).