The 1932 film of The Johns Hopkins Hospital is just one of more than 8,000 films and videos in the Johns Hopkins medical collection, one of the oldest and most extensive moving-image archives of a medical institution, according to Dale Levitz, director of Hopkins Medical Video.

But many of those old films and videos -- and other films and videos around the Johns Hopkins institutions -- are showing signs of age and are in varying degrees of degradation. In the past year, efforts have been made to draw attention to the plight of these rare and priceless Hopkins moments.

To learn more and to see some of this irreplaceable footage, go to the Web to watch Institutional Amnesia, a short film that looks at the Johns Hopkins film and video collections. The URL is mfile.akamai.com/7111/rm/www.jhu.edu/news_info/ realmedia/amnesiarm.ram.