The Library of Congress YouTube Channel

The Library of Congress, holder of more than 6 million films, broadcasts and sound recordings officially launched their YouTube channel today.

The channel will feature several videos including author presentations, scholar discussions, and the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison. Among others, the Edison collection includes the first moving picture – the Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze recorded on January 7, 1894.

Some of the other Edison videos range from boxing cats and vaudeville performers to a Sioux Tribe shown in full war paint and costumes. The video summaries are also informative. One of the Edison films labled, “Newark Athlete,” is described as an, “experimental fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experiemental horizontal feed kenetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.”

The Library of Congress has promised to keep adding content to the YouTube channel as they do in their collaboration with Flickr on “The Commons” project where thousands of non-copyrighted images have been uploaded to Flickr with 50 new photos added each week.

The Library of Congress also plans to make its audiovisual collection available on iTunes in the near future. 

Below is an example of an Edison film found at the Library of Congress YouTube Channel.