More than 6 million film and recording artefacts
� including footage of Elvis�s gyrations � have
a new home on a hillside in this town southwest
of Washington, D.C. The National Audio-Visual
Conservation Centre was officially turned over
to the Library of Congress on Thursday. The
three-building complex brings together all the
library's scattered recordings and conservation
staff in a specially equipped centre for the
first time. "It assures the permanent storage
and preservation and heightened access to the
audiovisual heritage of the last 110 years,"
said James H. Billington, the librarian of
Congress.
A $155 million gift from David Woodley Packard,
son of the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co.,
and the Packard Humanities Institute, helped
make the centre a reality. Congress appropriated
$82 million for the project. The trove of 6.3
million items includes footage of Elvis's 1964
movie "Viva Las Vegas," the complete set of Ed
Sullivan's variety shows and footage of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech after
the Pearl Harbor attack. The oldest moving image
in the collection is a five-second kinetoscope
movie of a sneeze, made by Thomas Edison in
1894. The oldest sounds are on two wax cylinders
produced by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner
Tainter in 1889. The library receives 120,000
gifts of film and sound a year. Mitch Miller,
for example, just sent 200 boxes of 16mm copies
of his TV program from the 1960s.
A key mission of the centre is to transfer
unique historical images and sounds from fragile
cylinders, tapes or films to digital files,
which are less apt to deteriorate. The
electronic versions also can be summoned by
researchers at the Library of Congress buildings
in Washington. The centre contains 415,000
square feet � about eight times the size of the
White House. "The reason we spent so much money
is that it required a lot of money. There wasn't
any way to do it unless we were willing to make
a large commitment," Packard told The Washington
Post. "The storage facilities are better than
the library has ever had in the past and better
than some standards for preservation recommend,"
said Gregory Lukow, the centre's chief. The
centre brings together materials that were once
divided among centres on Capitol Hill and in
Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Source: The Washington Post.
Posted: 29th. July 2007
