This past week the Library of Congress arranged to have the Junior Fellows tour their audio-visual campus out in Culpeper, Virginia. The campus is 2 hours away from DC, so they bused us all there. It was a fascinating 45 acre campus that houses one of the worlds most comprehensive collection of film, television, sound recordings, and radio broadcasts. They receive any audio visual formats that are under copyright, including all the new Hollywood movies. They collect in all formats...from laser discs, VHS, DVDs, cassettes, records, and so on! It is a very impressive campus with some very high tech equipment. It was hard to understand all the systems and processes they told us about and they also have quite sophisticated machines that are currently being used to digitize these specialized collections. I've included some pictures of all the stuff I saw...although I can't quite remember exactly what the equipment does! I've listed captions for what I can remember.
One of the film vaults
A record being cleaned
The Nitrate film vaults (it was 39 degrees here...cold!!)
Some nitrate films (aged and damaged ones from the collection)
Some machines that digitize (although I can't remember what format)
Paper strip of The Great Train Robbery, a silent film from 1903 (one of the first feature length films)
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