Meet Mabel, Mattie, Oliver and pet dog Lady Luck. They live in their family home, Halycon Hill, in Lebanon, Ky. For fun, they enjoy reading, playing croquet, gardening, knitting and cooking. Some nights you can find them gathered around the piano, enjoying a little evening musical respite. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? An ideal family enjoying time together paints a pretty portrait. In 1938, the Kellys did just that for a home movie shot by Wallace Kelly, a prolific artist who often documented his family’s life on film.

In December 2007, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington named Kelly’s home movie “Our Day” as one of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry, which now lists 475 films deemed to have cultural, historical or aesthetical significance and to be worthy of preservation. The film joins such classics as “Bullitt,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Grand Hotel,” “Oklahoma!” and “12 Angry Men.” And, although Universal Studios theme parks have decided to decommission the De Lorean and power down the flux capacitor, the time machine lives on at the Library with the 1985 sci-fi classic “Back to the Future” also added to the registry.

Each year, the National Film Preservation Board, the Library’s Motion Picture Division staff, and, yes, the public nominate hundreds of titles. And, the people’s votes do count. The Library invites you to make your recommendations.

In July 2007, the Library of Congress opened its new Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, which will dramatically expand the Library's preservation capacity. For each title named to the registry, the Library works to ensure that the film is preserved for future generations, either through the Library’s massive motion-picture preservation program that works out of the new facility or through collaborative ventures with other archives, motion-picture studios and independent filmmakers.