National Archives and Records Service film-vault fire at Suitland, Md. : hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Ninety-sixth Congress, first session, June 19 and 21, 1979 (1979)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

181 Prior to 1912, the Library retained copyright deposits of motion pictures in the form of prints on paper, made from the original negatives. In 1912 the copyright law was amended to make possible the deposit of prints on motion picture film, but, since film was not considered a permanent medium, they were not retained after copyright registration. Instead the Library systematically retained scripts, story summaries, and other supporting documents of the films. In the late 1940' s, the motion picture industry began to phase out 35mm cellulose nitrate stock. The advent of safety film in 35mm made possible a more permanent collection of early motion pictures, by photographically copying the nitrate onto safety film. By 1958 the Library was receiving support for this activity from Congress, and began in a limited way to reprint the small amount of nitrate motion picture film in its possession onto permanent film stock. With the founding of the American Film Institute, in the late 1960's, it became possible for the Library of Congress to acquire some of the nitrate films it had returned to copyright claimants during the early years when we did not keep deposited motion pictures. The AFI staff had contacts in the film industry, and were anxious to assist in the preservation of the early works of these companies. The Library received a series of grants for the preservation of films. Through gift and deposit arrangements we were able to obtain some of the most significant surviving films from the silent and early sound periods, including documentaries as well as entertainment films.