TV and sound collection. The collection ranges from 1890s motion pictures to today’s TV programs – an unparalleled record of American and international creativity in moving images. The nation’s largest public collection of sound recordings is held by the Library of Congress – nearly 3.5 million recordings in all. There are music, spoken word and radio broadcast recordings from over 110 years and representing every audio format from cylinders to CDs (including even Dictabelts), with a wide range of subjects and genres.The Center has 90 miles of shelves, rooms crammed with every known type of playback equipment, a commercial film development lab, a wing just for cleaning and restoration. Most of the building is underground, with seemingly endless media vaults under central Virginia’s Pony Mountain. The digital archives will soon surpass those of Google. Terabytes are becoming dated terminology for storage – it’s now petabytes. A three-minute video transfer uses 400 GB of storage space.
The Conservation Center uses the Millennia LOC Archiving Phono Preamp Systems in its state-of-the-art transcription rooms. The systems provide analog preamplification and EQ for the Library’s entire collection of LPs, 78s, 16” transcriptions, Edison cylinders and many other electromechanical formats. It provides an acoustically invisible signal path for the digitizing of priceless audio treasures for posterity. The director of the AV Conservation Center, Greg Lukow, said “Not only will these technologies enable exponential increases in the production of high-quality preservation copies of materials that are deteriorating in their current formats, but they will provide researchers with better, faster access to more of these materials in the future.”
[Our thanks to Joel Silverman of Millennia and to Wikipedia for information in this article.]
