From Wired Magazine: Inside the Nuclear Bunker Where America Preserves Its Film History -

posted by ThrHistoricalSociety on July 10, 2015 at 4:21 pm

“If the film is rare, highly flammable, and was made before 1951, there’s a good chance it’ll end up on George Willeman’s desk.”

“Or more specifically, in one of his vaults. As the Nitrate Film Vault Manager at The Library of Congress’ Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, Willeman presides over more than 160,000 reels of combustible cinematic treasure, from the original camera negatives of 1903’s The Great Train Robbery to the early holdings of big studios like Columbia, Warner Bros, and Universal. And more barrels keep showing up every week…

If you’re a cinephile with hoarding tendencies, the Packard campus is pretty much heaven on earth. One of the Library’s overarching missions is to preserve, in perpetuity, America’s memory for future generations. That means everything that shows up at Packard—films, videotapes, manuscripts, posters, screenplays, music, spoken word and radio broadcast recordings, and more recently, videogames—never gets turned away."

READ MORE on WIRED http://www.wired.com/2015/07/film-preservation/ All images courtesy of WIRED; Jared Soares for WIRED