Elvis features in new US National Archive

Elvis features in new US National Archive:

More than 6 million film and recording artefacts, including footage of Elvis' gyrations, have a new home on a hillside in this town southwest of Washington, D.C. The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center was officially turned over to the Library of Congress on Thursday. The three-building complex brings together all the library's scattered recordings and conservation staff in a specially equipped center for the first time. "It assures the permanent storage and preservation and heightened access to the audiovisual heritage of the last 110 years," said James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress.

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A $155 million gift from David Woodley Packard, son of the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Co. helped make the center a reality. Congress appropriated $82 million for the project. The trove of 6.3 million items includes footage of Elvis' 1964 movie Viva Las Vegas, the complete set of Ed Sullivan's variety shows and footage of President Franklin D.Roosevelt's speech after the Pearl Harbor attack. The oldest moving image in the collection is a five-second kinetoscope movie of a sneeze, made by Thomas Edison in 1894. The oldest sounds are on two wax cylinders produced by Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter in 1889. The library receives 120,000 gifts of film and round a year. Mitch Miller, for example, just sent 200 boxes of 16mm copies of his TV program from the 1960s. A key mission of the center is to transfer unique historical images and sounds from fragile cylinders, tapes or films to digital files, which are less apt to deteriorate.

(News, Source; The Washington Post)