Texas Archive of the Moving Image

Looking for a reason to fall in love with the Internet all over again? If you're a fan of Texas history and culture like I am, you need look no further than the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI).

Created by an Austin nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving Texas film heritage, the site is an amazing library of home movies, industrial and educational films, documentaries, local TV programs, news stories and commercials, and all manner of Texas-related video ephemera. If you're looking for slickly produced, Hollywood-style takes on Texas, you probably won't find them on the TAMI site. But if you're looking for 1960s Austin National Bank commercials, an early 1970s Texas Education Agency film titled The New American Schoolhouse, a family's home movies of their trips around Austin and Central Texas in the 1950s, or footage of Harry Truman's 1948 visit to El Paso, TAMI is the site for you.

The beauty of the site is that so much of its content was completely ordinary in its day, but is now extraordinary. Many of the films and videos weren't meant to stand the test of time; they were purely utilitarian productions designed for short-term use, to entertain, entice or instruct their audience and then be discarded or relegated to a musty storage closet. But their creators unwittingly captured glimpses of real, everyday life that are now unexpectedly interesting, warmly nostalgic and of great historical value. And thanks to TAMI, these long-lost films and videos are seeing the light of day again. Again, TAMI is another reason to love the Internet.