A good government institution?

I read a great article from the creativeCOW magazine recently about film preservation and restoration. I think the author, Ken Weissman – Supervisor of the Film Preservation Laboratory at the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, has the right idea in this. Most people would say to go straight to digital these days, but the simplicity of film can make it truly last forever. I think that there could definitely be a digital copy that people could access online, and under some kind of creative commons or open source copyright much like the Gutenberg project, for a lot of this stuff, though. Regardless, I like that someone is preserving this stuff and I think the United States Library of Congress is much like the great Library of Alexandria of old. Here are a few pull quotes from the article, which I highly recommend that you read in full here.

“These paper prints exist because of a vaguery in the copyright law at the time that motion pictures were invented. The Copyright Office at the Library interpreted the law to say that a motion picture film is simply a series of still photographs, and therefore the still photographic copyright law applied. If you wanted to copyright a motion picture, you had to provide the Library of Congress two copies of the film, and they had to be on paper. Not film.
A process was invented to literally create long strips of photographic paper, exactly the size of 35mm film stock, and then create contact prints from the original 35mm negatives, onto those long strips of paper. These were then deposited with the Library.”

“We have differing conditions depending upon the materials stored in them and their use. Our nitrate film is stored at 39 degrees Fahrenheit, with 30% relative humidity. This equates to a Preservation Index of 655 years.
For non-nitrate film preservation masters (also known as “safety film”), we store at 25 degrees Fahrenheit, 30% relative humidity, for a PI of 2125 years. All of our new film preservation masters go into this storage environment.
The remainder of our collection includes magnetic tapes of all types and flavors, both audio and video — Edison cylinders, wire recordings, metal stampers, etc. You name it, we probably have it. These are stored at 45 degrees Fahrenheit, 30% relative humidity, for a PI of 429 years, and in some cases, at 50 degrees, 30% relative humidity, for a PI of 244 years.”

“On the other hand, you have hard drives, or any kind of digital storage. You can’t look at the files in and of themselves. You need a lot of technology to bring them back, and always have to wonder if, when the time comes, if that technology will still be available. The beauty of film is that the machine it takes to look at the images is amazingly simple. You need a light source, you need a lens, you need something to shine it on, and then you can see it.”

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© This article is copyright of Chris Lane Photo and should not be found elsewhere.

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Tags: film, Library of Congress, restoration
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