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)

411 Introduct ion The nation faces a crisis affecting the preservation of our .national heritage as recorded in the American newsreeis from 1911 to 1967. This is a crisis because the record is disappearing fast; at a rate of about 500,000 feet per year. As the film ages the chances. of rescuing .valuable pictorial information from certain destruction grov/ slimmer and slimmer. The rate of loss will not remain constant but will increase geometrically. Ten or twenty years from now millions of feet will have reached its maximum life expectancy. This widespread, inevitable deterioration, together with the fire hazard Inherent in the storage of nitrate film, will cause the irreparable loss of all newsreel holdings that have not been copied on _to safety film. All that will remain of our past v;i 1 1 be snips of nev^reel excerpts in television documentaries, bearing little or no relationship to the complete original record. The first decade of nev/sreel history (1911-1920) exists in but a few scattered issues. Less than 25% of the newsreels from the 1920s are known to exist. A great deal has already been lost from the 1930s and 19'^0s, the last years of the nitrate period. Not even the safety era negatives are entirely immune to damage and destruction. In sum, approximately 170 million feet of primarily negative newsreel film requires one form or another of preservation. A plan exists for holdings in the public sector; none exists for the millions of feet still in private hands. The magnitude of the crisis and the necessity for a timely solution require intervention and support on a federal level. In the first place, access to records of the past are fundamental to the precepts of a democratic society. Moreover, society has a moral obligation to preserve