Национальный центр сохранения аудиовизуального наследия Конгресса США

US Library of Congress audiovisual archive

The National Audiovisual Conservation Center, also known as the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation, is the Library of Congress's audiovisual archive located inside Mount Pony in Culpeper, Virginia.

From 1969 to 1988, the campus was a high security storage facility operated by the Federal Reserve Board. With the approval of the United States Congress in 1997, it was purchased by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond via a $5.5 million grant, done on behalf of the Library of Congress. With a further $150 million from the Packard Humanities Institute and $82.1 million from Congress, the facility was transformed into the National Audio Visual Conservation Center, which completed construction in mid 2007, and after transfer of the bulk of archives, opened for free public movie screenings on most weekends in the fall 2008. The campus offered, for the first time, a single site to store all 6.3 million pieces of the library's movie, television, and sound collection. Technically, the Packard Campus (PCAVC) is just the largest part of the whole National Audio Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC), which also consists of the Library of Congress's Motion Picture and Television Division and Recorded Sound Division reference centers on Capitol Hill, the Mary Pickford Theater, and any other Library of Congress audio visual storage facilities that remain outside the Packard Campus. The PCAVC design, named Best of 2007 by Mid Atlantic Construction Magazine, involved upgrading the existing bunker and creating an entirely new, below ground entry building that also includes a large screening room, office space and research facilities. Designers BAR Architects, project architect SmithGroup and landscape designers SWA Group, along with DPR Construction, Inc., collaborated in what is now the largest green roofed commercial facility in the eastern United States, blending into the surrounding environment and ecosystem.

With Cold War tensions came fear that in the event of a nuclear war, the economy of the United States would be destroyed. In response to this, the United States Federal Reserve constructed a bunker to house enough U. S. currency to replenish the cash supply east of the Mississippi River in the event of a catastrophic event. Dedicated on December 10, 1969, the 121.92 m, radiation hardened facility was constructed of steel reinforced concrete 0.30 m thick. Lead lined shutters could be dropped to shield the windows of the semi recessed facility, which is covered by of dirt and surrounded by barbed wire fences and a guard post. The seven computers at the facility, operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, were the central node for all American electronic funds transfer activities. The underground vaults (some set to temperatures below freezing) contain nearly of shelving, not including 124 nitrate film vaults: the largest nitrate film storage complex in the Western hemisphere. The campus's data center is the first archive to preserve digital content at the petabyte (1 million gigabyte) level. The films screened were not only from the Library of Congress's collections, but also from other participating film archives, which have included the George Eastman House, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the EYE Film Institute of the Netherlands, the University of Southern California's Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, the Lobster Film Archive, and the Newsfilm Library at the University of South Carolina. Screenings were held in the Packard Campus Theater.

The Packard Campus hosts an annual open house on the Columbus Day federal holiday, offering the general public the opportunity to tour the facility and attend presentations by campus staff about the work they do for the Library of Congress and the audio visual collections they maintain in the facility.