February 26, 2004
Bettman Archive Report
Joho visits the Bettman Archive:I spent yesterday underground at the Bettman Archive, the "picture mine" as Dirck Halstead calls it in an excellent article. The Bettman is one of the largest and most important collections of photographs, 11 million all told. They were moved from Manhattan to a former limestone mine in Pennsylvania in 2001 on the recommendation of Henry Willhelm, an authority on preserving photographs, not just because the site has iron gates and armed guards but more importantly because there they can be kept at sub-zero temperatures. Willhelm — who I got to talk with yesterday — believes that the photographs, which had been deteriorating badly, will now last for thousands of years. And it's not just the photographs and negatives that were at risk: They are kept in paper sleeves that contains the metadata vital to finding and making sense of the images.
The Bettman Archive is part of Corbis' collection, owned by Bill Gates. I'm not generally in favor of how much control Gates has over media (in addition to software, Gates also controls, for example, the entire Ansel Adam's archive--coupled with Microsoft's aggressive push for very restrictive Digital Rights Management technologies integrated into converging media, he's painting a troubling picture). But Gates, according to Joho's report, has been a good steward of the Bettman Archive, moving it to a an underground, climate-controlled location when it became apparent that the photographs were deteriorating in ambient conditions, possibly saving much of the archive from disintegration.
[via Joho the Blog]
Posted by johndan at February 26, 2004 04:21 PM
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