America's film heritage preserved at the Library of Congress

[jakeXT]

December 14, 2014, 9:48 AM|From silent films and Hollywood classics through the Golden Age of television, the curators at the Library of Congress painstakingly maintain its archive of 1.4 million films and video recordings as a time capsule of America as told through moving images. Martha Teichner goes underground for a look at this a national treasure.

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/americas-film-heritage-preserved-at-the-library-of-congress/

[appalachiablue]

1. Thanks. Interesting; saw a program years back that covered deterioration

of older films on silver nitrate and some early lost works. The Culpepper facility gives them good space. Librarians, archivists and curators are trained to focus on preservation and conservation. Education and public access are also vital. The LC is wonderful. I worked at the Smithsonian, the National Archives and the National Gallery of Art. Also love film, costume, textiles, etc.

[jakeXT]

2. What really surprised me was the practice of taping over of TV shows or dumping them into the sea

One of the lawyers doing the bargaining said that he
could "take care of it" in a "fair manner," and he did take care
of it. At 2 a.m., the next morning, he had three huge semis back
up to the loading dock at ABC, filled them all with stored
kinescopes and 2" videotapes, drove them to a waiting barge in
New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the
Statue of Liberty and dumped them in the Upper New York Bay.
Very neat. No problem.

...

Almost all of NBC's The Tonight Show with Jack Paar and the first ten years (1962–1972) hosted by Johnny Carson were taped over by the network and no longer exist. The videotape was being used repeatedly, hence the reason that Carson's Tonight Show picture looked muddy during broadcast in the late 1960s. Selected sequences from the 1962–1972 era survive and were often replayed by Carson himself (particularly in the months preceding his retirement in 1992) and have been released to home video. Some Paar episodes also survive and have also been released to home video—in this case, DVD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_television_broadcasts