>From my Inbox: The Bettman Archive used to reside in downtown Manhattan. It is now under a mountain in western Pennsylvania in a very cold vault owned by a Bill Gates Company named Corbis. This very extensive article in the Washington Post will be of great interest to any who are involved with history, photography, historic picture archives and the like. Any new to the problem of photograph degredation with heat and time, will also gain useful knowledge from this article about the dangers lurking for print photograph collections and find cause for improvement in preservation facilities or in funding and implementation of digitization projects for valuable photograph collections.
Buried Treasure Why has Bill Gates stashed millions of the greatest images of the 20th century under a mountain in Pennsylvania? By Mary Battiata Sunday, May 18, 2003; Page W14 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57798-2003May15.html> The vault is the only privately owned, subzero underground vault in the country, and probably the world. It is the coldest, and, it's fair to say, the most controversial. Until the photographs were moved here in a caravan of 18 refrigerated vans in 2001, most of them had been stored for decades in a series of creaky office buildings on lower Broadway in Manhattan. And there they might have stayed, except for one problem. The pictures were dying. Deteriorating rapidly and dramatically -- buckling, fading, mottling, fairly shrieking for help, like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz. "It was obvious to anyone who came through the door that we had a problem," said one Bettmann photo researcher. "The whole place smelled like vinegar." The Bettmann was not the only photography archive so afflicted. In fact, it was only the tip of an ugly iceberg. Over the past 20 years, photography archivists and preservationists have discovered, to their consternation and dismay, that huge swaths of the pictures taken during the past 100 years -- the century of photography -- are disintegrating, undergoing a spontaneous chemical decomposition that will, if left unchecked, render most of them unintelligible and unusable within the next 20 to 50 years. -------------------------- The full article may be read at the URL above. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
