Moving Image Collections: A Window to the World's Moving Images

The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center

The Library of Congress is the national library of the United States. Founded in 1800, it is America’s oldest publicly funded cultural institution. In that role and in accordance with its Congressional mandate, the Library’s mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. The Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS) holds the world’s largest collections of films, television, radio, and recorded sound and is responsible for the preservation of more than half of America’s audio-visual heritage. The collections are the most comprehensive of their kind ever assembled by a research institution, and are unparalleled in the depth and breadth of their international and historical scope.

The new National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) of the Library of Congress will be the first centralized facility in America especially planned and designed for the acquisition, cataloging, storage and preservation of the nation’s heritage collections of moving images and recorded sounds. The NAVCC is being constructed through an extraordinary partnership with the Packard Humanities Institute on a forty-five acre campus near Culpeper, Virginia. It is expected to be the largest facility of its kind, a state-of-the-art center incorporating new capabilities that are unprecedented within the global audio-visual preservation community.

Collections Storage: The new Center will enable the Library for the first time to consolidate its existing moving image and recorded sound collections in a single, centralized facility that also provides space sufficient to house projected collections growth for 25 years after move-in. Currently these collections are housed in seven facilities in four states and the District of Columbia; none of the existing facilities were designed to meet the state-of-the-art environmental standards that will be found at the NAVCC. Currently, the Library’s audio-visual collections include an estimated 4 million items – over 1 million film and video items and nearly 3 million sound recordings – and are growing at an average rate of 120,000 items annually.

Preservation Reformatting: The NAVCC Preservation Laboratories are being designed to significantly increase preservation throughput for all a/v formats. Without the NAVCC, current rates of reformatting production using traditional analog methods and existing resources would result in the preservation of only 5% of total endangered sound and video materials by the year 2015. By contrast, the new digital laboratories and resources planned for the Center will enable the Library to preserve over 50% of these endangered collections in the same 10-year period. This accelerated preservation capacity is vitally important from a cost-benefit analysis; the longer these fragile media are allowed to continue their slow, inevitable march toward deterioration, the more costly and time-consuming will be the work needed to restore them.

Digital Repository and Access: The NAVCC will allow Library staff to perform ground-breaking work in the areas of digital conversion, born-digital capture, and in providing new avenues for access. The Center will include a Digital Audio-Visual Preservation System that will preserve and provide research access to both newly acquired born-digital content, as well as digitized analog legacy formats. This new Digital Preservation System is contributing greatly to the Library’s overall development of a digital preservation strategy and content repository.

Service Innovations: The NAVCC is being designed to incorporate new capabilities that are unprecedented within the global audio-visual preservation community. It will achieve significant innovations and expansions to the MBRS Division’s existing operations and business model. In addition to the core mission of preserving and providing access to the Library’s own collections, the NAVCC will enable the Library to broaden its preservation and access services to outside customers and partners, including archives, libraries and museums in both the public and private sectors.

Strategic Asset: The NAVCC is of utmost strategic importance to the Library. It is a key investment component of the National Library’s strategic plan. It is serving as a test bed for research and innovation of the Digital Lifecycle for audio-visual formats, and as such is a key asset in advancing the goals of the NDIIPP. A demonstrated return on investment will provide the Library with an extraordinary success story that can be leveraged to attract other sources of private funding in the future. The public-private partnership embodied in the NAVCC will enable the Library to achieve new levels of preservation and access that would have been unimaginable without the Culpeper facility.

Construction Elements and Phases: The NAVCC campus is comprised of four building components totaling 415,000 square feet of space. Construction on the site began in August 2003, and the facility will be built and transferred to the government in two phases

• Phase 1: This includes the Collections Building, an existing former Federal Reserve Bank facility that will be converted entirely to storage for all sound and non-nitrate moving image holdings (135,000 square feet). It also includes the Central Plant to be built into the hillside behind the existing Collections building, with office space for Architect of the Capitol staff (50,000 sf).
• Phase 2: This includes the Conservation Building, the new main office building with Moving Image Section staff on the 1st floor, Recorded Sound Section and Administrative offices on the 2nd floor, and the Film and Sound & Video preservation laboratories on the 3rd floor (175,000 square feet total). It also includes the Nitrate Vaults, comprised of 122 newly constructed individual vaults within two storage pods built to meet the exacting requirements for storing nitrate motion picture film; nitrate flat film from the Library’s Prints & Photographs Division will also be stored in these vaults (55,000 sf).

Move-In and Occupancy Schedule: Phase 1 is scheduled for completion in June 2005. At this time, the Library will be able to move all recorded sound and (non-nitrate) moving image collections into the Collections storage building. Phase 2 will be completed in April 2006. The entire facility will be transferred to the government at this time, and staff from Capitol Hill and Dayton, Ohio, as well as the nitrate film in Dayton, will be relocated to Culpeper.

Staffing Projections: Currently the MBRS Division has approximately 110 staff positions. The Library has informed Congress that approximately 140 staff will be moving to the new facility when it opens; this number will grow in later years as operations continue to ramp up. Another 10-15 NAVCC staff will remain on Capitol Hill to continue providing patron services in the Motion Picture and Recorded Sound Reading Rooms.

Contact Information and Web Sites

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division
The Library of Congress
James Madison Memorial Bldg., LM-338
101 Independence Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20540-4690

Phone: (202) 707-5840
Fax: (202) 707-2371

Motion Picture and Television Reading Room
Recorded Sound Reference Center