National Archives video online courtesy Google

National Archives video online courtesy Google

Search engine giants Google have announced that they are starting to offer the films and digital video content from the U.S. National Archives as part of an effort to expand the content offered on its online video service.

This freely available public domain digital content would include clips from the World War II newsreels and the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. The agreement with the National Archive group is however not exclusive and the company is beginning by offering around 103 films.

Google has offered their services for free to the organization for digitizing this content and making them available for free on the internet for anyone to view and download them. The pilot program currently going on includes films from a pretty focused group and includes 23 movies about the creation of the national parks system, 19 documentaries from NASA (including the famous 1969 moon landing), 61 World War II newsreels from the US Office of War Information, and one clip from Thomas Edison’s collection.