Unexpected treasure

I don't remember what I was looking for today, but on YouTube, I stumbled across a series of short silent films from the Library of Congress.

They're all, as far as I can tell, from the Edison studio, and all from the 1890s. One of them shows a man taking snuff and sneezing, which I'd seen before. The others, though... One shows a group of Sioux doing the Ghost Dance, one shows three Japanese women doing the Imperial Dance, one has Annie Oakley shooting through coins thrown into the air by her assistant.

Each little movie is less than a minute long, and some are jumpy, but overall, the quality is very good, and a fascinating look at the way people used to be, and the things that people wanted to watch in the new medium. Edison's people were turning the motion-picture camera on anything they wanted, and cranking away; the result is a series of short documentaries of a life long gone. (One of the films shows several stablehands rescuing four horses and a burning wagon from a barn.)

One thing that's rather annoying is that each film has an announcement that the film comes from the Library of Congress, and after it ends, there's another, similar announcement. I muted the sound, which made it much easier to concentrate on what I was seeing on the little screen of YouTube.

One film shows two men dancing, an image of which was used to publicize the documentary The Celluloid Closet, about homosexuality in film, onscreen and off. The little film on YouTube shows that the two of them aren't very graceful in their dancing efforts, with a lone violinist playing in the background, and another man appearing several seconds into the film.

This is the kind of thing we need - short silents available to the public. The LoC has a rather staggering number of films from the silent era in its collection, and very few of them can be seen. Is there no way that, similar to Warner Brothers, they can create an online ordering system so that those who want a certain film can order it on DVD?