UK: BFI's New £12m Film Storage Facility to Preserve Britain's Reel History

From The Guardian:

The store has been built on a nuclear bunker site deep in the Warwickshire countryside and will be capable of holding more than 450,000 cans of the nation’s film – everything from Hitchcock to Ealing to Carry On.

Robin Baker, head curator of the BFI national archive, said it was an important moment for Britain’s film heritage. “I can think of nothing – in fact there is nothing – as transformative for the safety of the national collection as this.”

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“Digitisation is not a panacea,” said Baker. “We have no idea what state the digital files we look after are going to be in in 100 years’ time. I don’t know how many times we’ll have to copy digital files over the next couple of centuries and what information we may lose.

“There was years and years of archival practice of endlessly copying to different formats. Just think of the sheer cost. You don’t need to do a massively sophisticated cost analysis to realise just how much cheaper it is to build a vault.”

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See Also: Library and Archives Canada Marks the Opening of the New Nitrate Film Preservation Centre (6/21/2011)

See Also: Reference: Film: British Film Institute Statistical Yearbook 2011 Released and Available Online (8/26/2011)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Libraries, News