U Street Universe: Preserving America's Audio-Visual Heritage


Library of Congress National A/V Conservation Center, Culpeper, VA

Today, I had the privilege of touring the Library of Congress's National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in scenic Culpeper, Virginia in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

It's the world's largest a/v collection -- a 45-acre campus housing over 1.1 million visual materials and 3.5 million audio recordings on over 90 miles of underground shelving in climate-controlled vaults (and a nuclear bomb-proof underground bunker).

underground storage vault

The collection includes motion pictures, television programs, radio broadcasts, and sound recordings (including MUSIC!!).

The show Elvis Presley got his start on

Fewer than 20% of American silent films still survive in their complete form. And half of American films produced before 1950 no longer exist, while post-1950 films are threatened by fading and other forms of deterioration.

Thanks to federal funding, this facility has state-of-the-art capabilities to preserve a/v media in every format dating back 100 years, and to store them in a petabyte-level digital storage archive.