CSPAN: This week, the American cable network finally completed the digitization of its vast video archive. What does that mean for you? It means you can access online every C-SPAN program aired since 1987. 160,000 hours of video in total, covering 23 years of American political history. The Times has more on this story.

Popular Science: Thanks to Google, you can now freely access a 137-year archive  of Popular Science. As PopSci, founded in 1872, writes, “Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It’s an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology’s incredible potential to improve our lives.” If you spend some time with Brain Picking’s recent post, you’ll see why the PopSci archive holds so much interest. As a side note, you can also find a vast archive of Popular Mechanics via Google Books. Just click here and, as Wired put it, ”let the nerdgasmic loss of productivity commence.”

Spin Magazine: Google Books has also added to its virtual magazine shelf every issue of Spin, the music magazine Bob Guccione Jr. founded in 1985. As BoingBoing mentions today, it’s interesting to see “how awfully dated the design of the magazine is.”

Salman Rushdie: Now this isn’t a publicly available archive, but it’s worth knowing about. Archivists at Emory have been working with the digital assets of Salman Rushdie and developing a new field — “digital archaeology” — that will help scholars preserve and methodically study the digital remains (text documents, emails, browser logs and files) of writers and artists. You can watch Rushdie talk about the project, its challenges and benefits. (There’s another clip of him speaking here.) Then you have the archivists themselves talking about how they’re preserving Rushdie’s literary remains, down to the yellow sticky notes he attached to his computer. (Note: The Times has a piece on this project this week.)

New Magazine & Video Archives Coming Online is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics… Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.

This goes a long way toward explaining why 3.4 million people have watched The Known Universe since mid December. And, as Bill Rankin rightly suggested to me, it says something good about online culture, and what makes Open Culture work as a site. Each day, we try to give you a little awe and challenge. And for our next post: 10,000 Galaxies in 3D.

Why You Share is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

NOTE: You can find Sita Sings the Blues (and 125 other films) in our collection of Free Movies Online.

The Open v. Closed Culture Smackdown is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Why Open Video? is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

A Smart Guide to Free Magazines is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Back when Richard Dawkins (Oxford University) published The God Delusion in 2007, he made a fairly unexpected appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Quite the contrast in characters. Now that he has published his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, it was time for Dawkins to meet up with the bumptious one again. Here it goes. Watch above.

Richard Dawkins v. Bill O’Reilly: Round 2 is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

No one tells a better story than This American Life, the award-winning radio program coming out of Chicago. And no one is better positioned to explain the art of great story telling than the show’s host, Ira Glass. Above, Glass gives you his thoughts. And this clip comes in 4 acts. For more, get Act 2, 3, and 4.

Ira Glass on the Art of Story Telling is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Arts & Letters Daily is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

PBS and NPR are now posting taped interviews and videos of lectures by academics, adding to the growing number of free lectures online.

Their site, called Forum Network, says it makes thousands of lectures available, including the Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s take on calculating happiness in a lecture called “How to Measure Pleasure,” and a discussion by a Northeastern University professor, Nicholas Daniloff, about the difficulties of reporting in Russia in a lecture called “Of Spies and Spokesmen: The Challenge of Journalism in Russia.”

The Forum Network is now happily added to our collection, Intelligent Video: The Top Cultural & Educational Video Sites. (You will find about 50 intelligent video sites here.) For more free educational content, be sure to visit our collection of Free University Courses. It now features 200 free courses from leading universities, and you can download them all to your computer or mp3 player.

PBS and NPR Launch the Forum Network, Offering Free Online Lectures is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Late last week, we featured the free audio and text versions of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Today, we highlight a conversation that recently took place at The Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival, and it focuses on a similar question, really the main question preoccupying many business leaders these days : How to make money in an era when consumers expect information-based products (books, newspapers, etc.) to be free. The talk is moderated by James Fallows, and features Josh Tyrangiel (managing editor of Time.com), Priscilla Painton (editor-in-chief of the Simon & Schuster adult trade imprint), Bob Pittman (former CEO of MTV Networks, AOL Networks), and Deirdre Stanley (executive vice president and general counsel for Thomson Reuters). It runs an hour plus.

The Future of Content is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com