The Associated Press has just uploaded "one million minutes of historical footage" to YouTube! It's an impressive collection. Check it out on YouTube, or read their July 2015 press release AP makes one million minutes of historical footage available on YouTube; they say there will be over 550,000 videos from 1895 to present.
If you're a librarian or a search geek, however, you might want to head on over to the AP Archive page at http://www.aparchive.com/ which offers more search and browsing options. The search box is decent, permitting quotes and Boolean operators. The Advanced search pulldown, right next to the search box lets you search by date or decade, and also lets you specific color, aspect ratio, and original source.
The "Compilations" section offers pre-selected content on several subjects, such as
I discovered a challenge with dates on YouTube, which is troubling, because those are so important in searching for past events.
On YouTube, the dates range from unclear to actually wrong. I've seen some videos that say "published on July XX, 2015" which could be true. But I've seen videos about the death of Princess Diana (for example), that also say "published on July XX, 2015." This could be true, if they are saying that the video was published to YouTube on that date. But it's impossible to find the video's original date - aired or shot - on YouTube.
The archive site is much better on date display. A story about the Ferguson police chief has a "Date: 08/10/2014 05:18 PM" field. Presumably, that's the date that the video was aired, which was also presumably close to the date that it was shot.
It's much easier to share / reuse AP videos on YouTube, since they use the usual share and embed options. Here's a video of Panda Awareness Week in 20102 (tho' I don't know when in 2012):
I found a neat video of the Macy's Day Parade on Nov. 24, 1966, but I cannot easily share it. I emailed it to myself and have the link: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/view/13e43ef12e802047edf49dc863668a46?subClipIn=00:00:00&subClipOut=00:01:31 but it would be nice to be able to embed that too.
Still, for free, this is pretty awesome.
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