Searching High and Low

C-Span is about to launch a video archive that will include 160,000 hours of footage it has recorded since the 1980s.  A beta version is now available at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/

Their site says that “Every event covered by the C-SPAN Networks since 1987″ will be available.

Users can keyword search for videos or browse through various categories such as date, topics, or specific programs (Book TV, Washington Journal, etc.)  Those interested in books and authors will find over 8,000 Book TV videos available now.  One nice feature C-Span has included is giving users the ability to create a custom start and endpoint for a video (a “clip”) and generate a hyperlink directly to it. With this you can link people to a specific segment of any video.