We have always been told that “there is no financial model for archives.” This has begun to change a little in the entertainment industry with the ‘value added DVD’ that has a lot of historical outtakes etc. However much of our valuable past data still costs more money to store than can often be justified. Enter the web and Amazon. In an encouraging step for archives to gain a sustaining financial model, you can now purchase copies of footage from the National Archives through Amazon and their subsidiary Custom Flix.

It would be really great if they could offer you ANY part of the national archives, but I assume that is in the works as more and more of this content gets digitized. It is also a good preservation method to have this content distributed around as we painfully discovered with the moon landing tape kerfuffle…

Thanks to Stewart Brand for sending this Washington Post story to me (registration required).

Add England’s Rothamsted Experimental Station to the list of long-term experiments.

“Rothamsted’s Classical experiments are unique in their age and variety, and are, deservedly, world-famous. There are many other experiments on our Rothamsted and Woburn farms that, by conventional standards, can justifiably be described as ‘long-term’. Most of these were originally established to study long-term changes in soil fertility and soil properties. However, these experiments and a number of others are also valuable for addressing many other issues including tests on the incidence of pests, diseases and weeds; soil pollution; ecology of farmland; carbon sequestration; factors influencing the sustainability of arable agriculture.”

The image above is of the Broadbalk experiment, which had its first winter-wheat crop sown in autumn 1843, and has been sown and harvested every year since (image reference).