The Internet Moving Images Archive is a nonprofit initiative to open and promote film and video archives to the public by making their holdings freely available.

They've built a free, noncommercial website containing high-quality digitized versions of 360 (and soon, 1001) films from Prelinger Archives. All are available for downloading and reuse at no cost.

This resource contains ephemeral (advertising, educational, industrial,documentary, amateur and government) films relating to 20th-century American culture and society, media and media production, communication,technology, landscape, politics, warfare, migration and many other areas.

All are available for free downloading and reuse, with no restrictions other than that the films cannot be resold or licensed by anyone in their entirety or as stock footage. The intention is that these titles should circulate freely as "open-source" content.

You'll need a fast connection, as the digitized video files are in MPEG-2 format and quite large. However, they look great, and will play back on a regular TV screen as well on your computer. (See the site for information on playback and tech requirements). In the next few months they will also be available in MPEG-4, a friendlier format for lower-bandwidth users.

Rick hopes that easy access to these films will assist scholars, teachers, students, exhibitors and members of the general public in coming to terms with the complex and diverse audiovisual history of the 20th century.

Right now, the best way to reach the site is from the link on Rick's homepage: http://www.prelinger.com. Soon, the URL for this site will be http://www.moviearchive.org.

An article on the background and rationale for this project may be found at http://eserver.org/bs/52/prelinger.html. There is also much explanatory information on the site itself.

The Internet Moving Images Archive is a project of the Internet Archive ( http://www.archive.org) in collaboration with Prelinger Archives.