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| Library of Congress National A/V Conservation Center, Culpeper, VA |
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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).
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| underground storage vault |
The collection includes motion pictures, television programs, radio broadcasts, and sound recordings (including MUSIC!!).
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| 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.
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| Preservation work |
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| Mike Mashon, Head of Moving Images |
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| 78-rpm recording on metal, 1929 |
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| Paper print of D.W. Griffith's 1909 film, "The Lonely Villa" |
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| Gene DeAnna, Head of Recorded Sound |
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| Assortment of legacy microphones |
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| Edison cylinder, 1912 |
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| Center Chief Greg Lukow in the 206-seat theater |
Related links:
National Film Preservation Foundation
National Film Registry
National Recording Preservation Foundation
National Recording Registry
