IT'S ONLY A MOVING IMAGE Archives, Access and the Social Contract ...

entitlement19In fact, as many archivists know, people are beginning to feel quite a sense of entitlement relative to archival collections.They sometimes make demands that are difficult to address. On the positive side, we’ve ourselves discovered that peopledevelop passionate interest in unedited archival footage; they don’t lament the absence of editing, narration andbackground music, they want to see the original document! And many people remix, reedit and recontextualize thecollections. Since we gave almost 2,000 of our own films to the Internet Archive for unrestricted access and reuse, we’veseen around 8 million downloads in 7 years, and I’ll make a wild estimate that over ten thousand derivative works havebeen made from them.