The Library of Congress Packard Center is located in Culpeper, VA, in the foothills of the Blue ridge Mountains and is the place where our country's audio-visual heritage is collected, conserved, preserved, restored and stored. We were able to get a personal tour of the facility.

Once upon a time, there was no provision in the U.S. Copyright laws for the copyright of motion pictures. In order to protect their work, some producers took to making a positive print of every frame of film on long strips of paper and registering that for copyright since photographs at that time could be copyrighted. What we see here is the original paper print copyright deposit of Edwin S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery" (1903) which is acknowledged to be the first film to tell a story. It was a western shot in New Jersey (!) by the Thomas A. Edison Company. In many cases these paper prints outlived the actual films they represented and were used by the Library of Congress to accurately reproduce formerly lost films so they could be seen again. 

If you like classic films, this place is like finding the holy grail. Above left is a hallway holding many climate-controlled film vaults. These are the most advanced facilities in the world for storing and preserving motion picture film. Fitted with sophisticated fire prevention and suppression systems, there are two kinds of vaults--one kind for obsolete and volatile nitrate film (used until about 1950) and another type for more modern "safety" film. Each type of film requires a different kind of storage requirement. In the center is one vault holding Columbia Pictures films including Three Stooges shorts and the original negative for "Mr. Deeds Goes To Town" (Frank Capra, 1936) starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, right.

This is what the inside of a vault looks like, left. On the right, is where films are inspected, cleaned and preserved.

The facility preserves other things, too. In these two photos we see various models of every type of professional and home-use videotape machine ever used because the facility stores videotape in all formats. In this way materials stored on obsolete formats can be viewed and preserved in more modern formats, including digital.

On the left is the preservation master negative of "Gone With The Wind" (Victor Fleming, 1939) starring Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh and many more stars. On the right are the original studio master tapes of every album ever produced by Mitch Miller who was a well respected record industry executive in the mid 20th century who later created a popular series of "sing-along" albums with a distinctive sound that also spawned a well known NBC TV show.