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So there's this film somebody posted on You Tube in 2010.

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By the summer of 2015, over 71,000 people had watched it. The video appears to be haunting, archival footage–a documentary? a newsreel?–of work in a Parisian studio, circa 1919.  But this is no ordinary studio.  Instead of making busts of famous poets or rich patrons, the artists are sculpting new faces for soldiers gruesomely mutilated by war.

Art, war, medicine, movies: this is the kind of source that brings the past alive in all its power and complexity.  It's the kind of thing researchers would love to explore and teachers and students would love to use–indeed, already are using–in today's classrooms.  But there's a catch.

Like millions of other new historical sources now available on the Internet, we don't know enough about this film to use it in scholarship, teaching, or public history.  Who made this source, when, why?  Is it authentic, has it been edited? Where is it now, who owns it–how can we use it or cite it?  Will it be there tomorrow?

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