Add a chapter of Johns Hopkins history to your
"must-see" movie list for 2009.
With an $8,500 grant from the National Film
Preservation Foundation, the Applied Physics
Laboratory and
Sheridan Libraries have teamed up to restore the 1945
APL-produced film VT Radio
Proximity Fuze. The hourlong silent color movie shows
the development and deployment of the fuze —
APL's founding invention, which was judged to be one of the
three most valuable technology
developments of World War II (along with the atomic bomb
and radar). The fuze is a small device
inside an explosive that initiates detonation. The VT (for
"variable time"), or proximity, fuze was
designed to detonate a shell automatically when a target
came within a set distance or passed through
a given plane.
The newly restored film, available online at:
www.jhuapl.edu/aboutapl/heritage/fuze/default.asp
is a glimpse at a collection that could put some video
stores to shame. John O'Brien, assistant
supervisor of APL's Technical Communications Group, says
that the Lab has about 1,500 films dating
back to the 1940s, hundreds of audio files going back to
the '50s and about 10,000 videotapes dating
back to the '60s, as well as more than 200,000 photos and
negatives taken over the past six decades.
"We've migrated old tapes to new formats and scanned
old photos as we've used them," says
O'Brien, who previously headed the Lab's audio/visual
section. "We'd love to transfer all these assets
into a resource people could actually use. But the cost and
time required to preserve this much
electronic media is extensive."
For this project, he knew where to look for funding:
the JHU Recorded Image and Sound
Preservation Committee, created in 2004 by Winston Tabb,
Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and
Museums. Tabb asked the group to identify moving-picture
film and magnetic video and sound media
collections throughout the university and assist in
educating the research community about them,
along with recommending short- and long-term preservation
strategies.
"Our ability to preserve and protect the hundreds of
film, video and sound collections across
the university adds immeasurably to the research
collections available to the JHU community and to
the public," Tabb says.
The committee had previously secured grants from the
National Film Preservation Foundation to
restore a 1932 film on The Johns Hopkins Hospital and an
early 1940s-era documentary on wartime
medical units. The 2007 grant paid for a contract company
to ultrasonically clean the original VT fuze
film, which O'Brien says was just starting to deteriorate.
The company then made a new 16 mm color
print film as well as a digital tape.
The film is one of eight in the VT Fuze Collection,
which includes both color and black-and-white
newsreels, public information films, and testing and
training films. O'Brien says that the committee will
apply for another grant this year to restore the remaining
parts of the collection. "The film itself is
an example of APL being a cutting-edge organization from
the start," he says. "The fuze was a
significant scientific and engineering achievement, and
that we're able to preserve that part of the
record so people always know that was done here is very
important."
The JHU Recorded Image and Sound Preservation
Committee, led initially by Sophia Jordan-
Mowery, the Joseph Ruzicka and Marie Ruzicka Feldmann
Director of Library Preservation at the
Sheridan Libraries, uncovered countless treasures in its
initial survey of university collections.
"We were thrilled to find such a rich collection of
primary source material," Mowery says.
"However, many of the materials are in formats that are
extremely compromised, not only because
they were recorded on now-obsolete technology but because
the media are ephemeral and deteriorate
much more quickly than books and paper. Preserving these
collections requires that we both treat the
original format and migrate the information."
In addition to approaching the National Film
Preservation Foundation, the committee seeks
funding opportunities with organizations whose mission is
to preserve historical records, regardless of
format, according to Robert Klingenberger, preservation
coordinator at the Sheridan Libraries and
the current committee chair. The committee welcomes
inquiries about preserving nonprint media
collections from anyone in the JHU community.
For more information about the JHU Recorded Image and
Sound Preservation Committee, go to:
www.library.jhu.edu/departments/preservation/
RISPcommittee.
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