If it had a boot.bin file I am pretty sure you would be able to start it, either through an emulator, a hacked console, or a devkit. I wish I got my hands on it while I was still at uni, we had a few PSP devkits that laid unused because everyone was playing with PS3 and Vita devkits instead.
It's special because it was developed as part of an existing (reasonably noteworthy) franchise but never released to the public, so the version in the Library of Congress is probably one of very few in existence.
The screenshots in this blog post contain only small excerpts of the disc's contents, transformed substantially from their original format, so they pretty clearly fall under fair use.
Even untransformed excerpts/screenshots would almost certainly be fair use in a scholarly article about them. The LoC knows a thing or two about copyright.
While I agree with the sentiment, in media production, sometimes those resources don't exist, or are intentionally discarded, making this unenforceable. For instance, simple image edits often get saved only in the final image format, rather than as a layered image format intended for an image editor.
However, I do think this would be wildly useful for software source code. After all, what good would it do to have a piece of software fall into the public domain in binary form only? That would facilitate copying, but not building on that work.
