The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center has garnered a fair amount of media attention over the years and 2014 was no exception. Here’s a selection of print and broadcast stories from last year that, taken together, provide a good overview of who we are and what we do.
The announcement of new additions to the National Film Registry and the National Recording Registry always result in a spate of news stories. Here’s how the CBS Evening News covered the Recording Registry announcement.
The Film Registry proved an irresistible hook for HDNET Movies, who released a video in July that focuses on film preservation at the Packard Campus. In advance of the December NFR announcement we hosted a multi-day visit from CBS News reporter Martha Teichner for a story that aired on CBS Sunday Morning.
You’ll see that July’s Mostly Lost film identification workshop made an appearance in the CBS Sunday Morning piece. NPR also came to Mostly Lost for a story that aired on Weekend Edition Saturday.
Some stories prompted others. In August, my colleague Dave Gibson wrote a terrific post for our sister blog “The Signal” about video game preservation, which led to a larger, general story in Buzzfeed on the same topic. A reference in the Buzzfeed article to how Netflix registered physical copies of Orange is the New Black for copyright resulted in an article in The Verge about why we’re still accepting videotapes and DVD-Rs for copyright rather than files (and for a good article on the challenges of digital preservation, check out the Washingtonian piece from last September).
Similarly, our most popular “Now See Hear!” post of 2014–indeed, one of the most popular posts in the history of Library of Congress blogging–was the discovery of the Washington Senators 1924 World Series victory. Its popularity was no accident; we coordinated publication with a Washington Post “Sports Bog” post by Dan Steinberg, and given Dan’s deservedly large readership, a lot of people linked back to “Now See Hear!” to read more detail about the find. The Senators story got very wide coverage (it was even shown on the Nationals Park Jumbotron!) but my favorite was Keith Olbermann calling the action on his ESPN2 show.
And as a result of that hoopla, Spencer Fordin from MLB.com wrote a fun article in December about the Library’s rich holdings of baseball-related material.
Finally–and closer to home–we were proud to be featured in a charming series of videos produced by the Culpeper Tourism Office. I am obligated to disclose that my wife works for Tourism and I’d like to think that had no bearing whatsoever on my appearance as a talking head, but nonetheless…y’all come!