But even without the most famous photos, this collection is unarguably a treasure of visual documentation from the 20th century. Why, it sold it to Bill Gates, of course. Corbis , the Bill Gates-owned company that bought the archives in 1995, will keep almost anyone from ever seeing them again. The millions of images in the archive are scheduled to be sunk 220 feet down in a Pennsylvania limestone mine. They'll be placed into subzero humidity-controlled storage, safe forever from both human and natural disasters.
Many critical archivists claim the latter.
They assert that archivists must always strike a difficult balance between the twin duties of their trade, preserving the annals of history and somehow providing public access to those annals without damaging them. By locking up millions of images far away from human hands and eyes, Bettmann may have leaned tragically far toward preservation without concern for access. Archives shouldn't be sunk into mines, and they probably shouldn't be owned by large corporations. I'd like to see. It's probably obvious that the films in the Prelinger collection aren't exactly your big-screen Hollywood pictures.