43nd Annual ARSC Conference (Washington, D.C., May 27th-30th 2009)
Pre-Conference Tours on May 27, 2009
Pre-Conference Tour of NAVCC
Attendees of the 2009 ARSC conference are invited by the Library of Congress to Culpeper, Virginia to enjoy an in-depth tour of the new National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC). where the sound recording and moving image collections of the Library of Congress are now housed and preserved. The buildings on the 45-acre campus provide 415,000 square feet of space for cataloging, re-formatting, and storage of more than five million sound recordings, videotapes, motion pictures, and born-digital works. The buildings were specially designed and constructed for the Library by the Packard Humanities Institute to meet the preservation challenges of the 21st century.
Library staff have planned this full-day open-house in Culpeper especially for ARSC. Participants will be provided with floor plans of each of the three floors at the NAVCC and will be welcome in all of the primary areas:
- Moving Image Section
- Recorded Sound Section and Vault Spaces
- Digital Archive
- Audio and Video Preservation Sections
- Film Laboratory and Nitrate Film Vaults
- Mt. Pony Theater and Listening Auditorium
Library staff will be on-hand to discuss the facility and demonstrate their work in many areas, including:
- High-end audio preservation suites for disc and tape preservation
- Rooms for high-throughput audio digitization
- I.R.E.N.E. and SAMMA: new technologies for digitization of discs and videotapes
- Vintage A/V equipment
- Cataloging and collection management tools and strategies
- Processing of paper collections
- New workflow management software
- A/V conservation and storage strategies
The NAVCC tour is limited to 100 people; reservations will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. The $50.00 per-person fee for this optional pre-conference tour includes round-trip bus transportation from the Liaison Hotel and a box lunch. Due to expected demand, the tour is open only to those who register for the conference. No discount will be provided for local members who wish to provide their own transportation. Buses to Culpeper will leave the Liaison Hotel at 9:00am and will return to Washington by 6:15pm. The NAVCC tour has been sponsored in part by Millennia Music & Media Systems.
Pre-Conference Tours of Area Archives on Wednesday May 27, 2009
Three free tours of area archives are offered Wednesday afternoon to those not participating in the NAVCC tour. Reserve a space on one of these tours on the registration form. Tours will depart from the lobby of the Liaison Hotel at 1:00 p.m.
- National Public Radio and the Smithsonian-Folkways—Downtown Washington
- Library of Congress Music Division and American Folklife center—Capitol Hill
- National Archives II and the University of Maryland Library of American Broadcasting—College Park. (Participants in the College Park tour will travel there from the Liaison Hotel by Metro, accompanied by a local arrangements committee escort.)
