The Living Room Candidate

The Living Room Candidate at the Museum of the Moving Image in NY is an online collection of presidential campaign television ads from 1952-2004.

Selection
This collection consists of all of the presidential ads since 1952, the year of the first presidential ads. The material is still under copyright and is provided by several other institutions, including many presidential libraries. The collection is funded through the Liman Foundation and through a video-hosting donation from Mirror Image Internet, so it has on-going funding. It seems the collection is intended to be as comprehensive as possible. Playing the videos requires Windows Media Player or RealPlayer, and instructions are provided for how to view on both a Mac and a PC.
Object Characteristics
The objects are accompanied by enough metadata that the user can be confident that an object is what it claims to be. They have been produced in a way that endeavors to provide access to the widest population of users - both PC and Mac, using two software programs. Even if the videos can't play, text is provided that describes the background of both the campaign and the ads themselves, and complete transcripts are also available. The user can search the collection, and sorting options are available: by issue (war, taxes), type of commercial (biographical, fear, real people), and election year. You can look through related commercials as well.
Metadata
Extensive metadata is provided about the original object, but little is listed for the digital object - I would like to see information about how it was digitized (using what software) and when it was digitized. There is a Site Guide/Help page that gives background to the collection creation as well as specifications and navigation instructions.
Intended Audience
This is a very educational site, and entertaining as well. It would be useful for researchers in both political science as well as RTF/communications. It's culturally significant as well. The Museum obviously hopes/expects that teachers will take advantage of it in their classrooms because there is a Teacher page that provides lesson plans. Very fun and entertaining site. (You can see how ads have adapted to the average TV viewer's shrinking attention span.)