The advantages of digital access

Here's a comment about NARA's agreement to publish video via Google from the New York Times article linked in yesterday's Cliopatria post that underscores the comments I made at the AHA blog and here:

"Before that happened, we had 200 requests total for the whole year in our research room," Mr. Hastings said. "The first month the films were available on Google, there were about 200,000 hits on them — a thousandfold increase."