Please excuse cross postings.

Colleagues worried about preservation issues will find the following of
interest.

Best wishes,
Suzanne Dubeau




-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [DIG_REF] ARTICLE:  If a Picture is Worth One Thousand
Words,This Mountain Stores Lots of Words
Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 23:58:14 -0400
From: "David P. Dillard" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Discussion of digital reference
services<[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]

ARTICLE:  If a Picture is Worth One Thousand Words, This Mountain Stores
Lots of Words

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.