Step Inside the World’s Largest Collection of Films

We're going behind the scenes at a destination for film, music, and technology lovers

The Library of Congress Packard campus for Audiovisual Conservation, located in Culpeper, Virginia

So this facility is home to the world's largest collection of film, video, and sound recordings

We have 1.4 million individual reels of film and videotapes, 3.5 million sound recordings

and the preservation laboratories are responsible for making sure. these will be available to future generations

That's a lot of media to binge watch. There is a tremendous amount of that that goes on in this building

Love a good classic movie, like Casablanca, it's housed here. If you've ever copyrighted a work of media, it's likely housed here too

That's how this campus gets much of the content it preserves. What makes me you do to tell me I'd need a winner coat for this next little adventure

Well, we're in our nitrate vaults. It's 39 degrees Fahrenheit, 30% relative humidity

So nitrate film is the film stock used in Hollywood before 1951

The base of nitrate film is nitrocellulose, which is a cousin to gun cotton, so it's very flammable

If any of this film catches on fire, we can't put it out, we can only hope to contain it

because nitrate film creates its own oxygen when it burns. So it has to be stored in a lot of individual vaults

Of the 140 million feet of nitrate film we have here, I know, we have the original camera

negatives from Warner Brothers for all those Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Betty Davis

films in Three Stooges The original camera negatives for an experimental Thomas Edison film dating back to 1891 are also stored at the Packard campus If the zombie apocalypse occurs I thinking that this facility could be a pretty entertaining place to be

which isn't unreasonable, since the Packard campus of the National Audiovisual Conservation Center

is actually housed in what used to be a U.S. Federal Reserve bomb and radiation-proof bunker

which during the Cold War housed several billion dollars, enough money to replenish the U.S

east of the Mississippi during a catastrophic event. Most of the campus's 415,000 square feet of usable space

is located underground. So not only we're responsible for preserving audiovisual content

we have to preserve the machines that preserve the audiovisual content. It's a lot of maintenance and a lot of specialty knowledge and maintenance

that would go into doing that. Meaning antique formats and their antique players are kept a lot

live here by preservationists with a unique set of skills, which are sometimes learned on the job

because they aren't taught anywhere else. Inside the 205-seat on-site art deco theater

Mike and I sit down to screen a movie. A projectionist hand-threads 35-millimeter polyester film

With most theaters having converted to digital within the past decade, the Library of Congress is one of the few theaters left that's actually

running 35 millimeter on a regular basis. The theater opens its doors several times a week

for free public screenings, showing rare silent movies and other blockbusters and classics

and giving visitors a taste of the past with thoughts of the future