Google announced plans today to partner with the National Archives to digitize the institution’s media holdings, specifically through a pilot project to “digitize their video content and offer it to everyone in the world for free.” The plan is to make these resources readily available for educational use.

As Jon Steinback, Product Marketing Manager of Google Video, writes, “For many momentous events, words and pictures don’t transmit the full sense of what has transpired. To see for one’s self, through video and audio, brings an event to life.”

And here are a couple other multimedia resources that are invaluable for personal edification and classroom education: American Rhetoric and the Internet Archive Moving Images section, which features public domain movies, such as the 1951 classic “Duck and Cover.”

In particular, American Rhetoric features text, audio, and video in an online speech bank (such as, “I Have a Dream,” JFK Inaugural), a bank of famous movie speeches, and a special Christian Rhetoric section.