• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 6, 2010

The National Archives is one of the world's massive repositories of history. It is so filled with artifacts and stories that its catalog of items is numbing. No collection is more in need of careful curation and a simple show-and-tell model to bring things alive. And so it is great to see the Archive launch its own video series this week in tandem with Independence Day.

"Inside the Vaults" is an attempt to make its collections more accessible to the public and to bring some of the personality behind the institution forward. Archives staff will be used to present materials from the vaults and decipher some of the more complex aspects of American technical history in more understandable ways. The regular series will bring us inside the archives to look through the D.C. archives as well as the associated Presidential libraries and regional archives in this enormous network of artifacts.

The first in the series, launched last week, features the Declaration of Independence itself. Preserving the parchment has been a formidable technical challenge. Archives conservator Catherine Nicholson presents a brief recent history of the document's restoration and re-introduction to the public in its current form. And taking a cue from the Da Vinci Code/National Treasure motif of modern historical artifact mystery, she reveals a real mystery arising from the document. Whose hand print is that on one of the world's most famous documents?

The National Archives has a dedicated YouTube page that includes a rich catalog of lectures and preserved films. Video aficionados will not want to miss some of the real treasures in here. Among our favorites are samples of the "Private Snafu" cartoon series from World War II. These shorts, mostly written by Dr. Seuss and animated by A-team directors like Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng featured the Situation Normal All Fouled Up infantryman. The hapless soldier illustrated for the troops how not to just about everything.

And if you have a day to get lost in a hodgepodge of historical footage, access the growing pile of ARC (Archival Research Catalog) clips that they are posting online. The two-minute clips only whet your appetite for some of the amazing footage we can only hope one day will be put fully online. There are documentaries on the 1940 census, presidential addresses galore and even a Hollywood roundtable on the 1964 civil rights march on Washington that included Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, James Baldwin and Sidney Poitier.

The next time Google is looking to throw its money around to fund digitization projects, it could do worse than to help underwrite porting the National Archives video vault onto the Web.