New digs for old treasures - Library of Congress redeploys ex-Federal Reserve bank vault as a high-capacity digital archive
From Government Computer News:
Since the 1990s, just about every division of the Library of Congress has been running out of space, and the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound (MPBRS) Division has been perhaps the hardest hit.For more than 100 years, the library has collected moving pictures and audio recordings, amassing a trove of more than 4 million movies, videos, recorded broadcasts and sound recordings “on every imaginable format going back to 1890,” said LOC’s Gregory Lukow. . . .
. . . The division is moving this summer into the National Audio Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC), in Culpeper, Va., a gift from the Packard Humanities Institute.
The vaults of an old Federal Reserve Bank facility have been remodeled to provide 140,000 square feet of storage space for irreplaceable materials, and 300,000 square feet of new construction has added conservation labs with automated equipment to digitize old recordings, petabytes of storage and a high-speed link to servers feeding content to the library’s reading rooms on Capitol Hill.