That is not as simple as it sounds for two reasons. One is that even some of our second-generation equipment has become obsolete. But more important we are dealing with a tremendous amount of material to re-format. We have 68 employees meeting many preservation needs in labs in our Washington area facilities, and other employees and contractors help preserve materials throughout the more than thirty archival facilities, records centers, and Presidential libraries that we operate across the nation. But just to re-record our collection of ABC radio news coverage of the Cold War era, featuring such famous broadcasters as Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, means dealing with 27,000 disks.
Many photographic negatives are on deteriorating acetate film.
They can deteriorate even faster than the acidic paper with which we must deal to preserve millions of textual records. Among pictorial documents in jeopardy are images from the New Deal, the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar years. Our audio and visual records contain historical sights and sounds that bring the 20th century alive. Preserving such audio-visual material is simple, however, compared to the problems posed by the even newer information technologies of our time. As the government s record keeper, NARA faces increasingly enormous quantities of records generated with computer technology, such as word-processing documents, automated databases, and electronic mail.