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Thank you for inviting me to testify on a matter of great concern to the National Archives and Records Service, that is, the fire last December 7 in building A, one of our film vault structures at the Federal Center in Suitland, Md.
Archivists feel personally diminished whenever records of value in their custody are damaged or destroyed, and on that unfortunate day, 12.6 million feet of Universal Pictures newsreel footage were lost. The loss was primarily in outtakes — film not used in completed productions— but recent experience tells us that we would have retained from 62 to 68 percent of that footage as archivally valuable, disposing of the rest.
The film lost dated from 1930 to 1951. Portions deemed worthy of further preservation would have been converted from the chemically unstable and flammable nitrate base to safety film. But that was not to be.
What was lost was part of the original 28 million feet of film — 17 million feet of nitrate and 11 million feet of safety film — donated by Universal in 1970 and accepted by the National Archives on behalf of the American people for its historical value.
Substantial amounts of the edited Universal releases had already been converted at the time of the fire, and major conversion of the outtakes had been scheduled this year.
I know that this committee is principally concerned today with what the National Archives and Records Service has been doing to preserve its film holdings and to prevent further tragic instances such as that which occurred last December.
But I also know that you are very much interested in what we are doing to preserve all the records in the National Archives: The 1.3 million cubic feet of paper records, the 5 million photographs, 1.6 million maps, 107,000 sound recordings, 9.7 million aerial photographs, and 3,600 reels of ADP tapes — as well as the 85 million feet of motion picture film.
Before I concentrate on film, therefore, let me say a few words about preservation problems generally at the National Archives.
There is no sense in deluding ourselves. The problems are enormous. The National Archives started wrestling with them in 1934 when it came into existence and inherited the Nation's official records which had suffered from 150 years of neglect.
We now estimate that there are some 3 billion items in the National Archives and, like all finite things, they began deteriorating the day they were created. Some need preservation work now, some will need it in 10 years, some in 100 years.
We have been trying to assign priorities and spread our preservation dollars around, but there ai-e never enough funds for all the work that needs doing. It would be desirable, for instance, to deacidify all of the paper records in the National Archives, but we estimate that to do this for the records we will liave by the year 2000 would cost about $1 billion.
To microfilm them would cost several hundred million dollars. That is why we are searching for new technologies to bring costs down : such advances as bulk deactification of documents and improved automation in microfilming processes. That is why we have made a series of