Federal Public Service Recognition Week – George Willeman

[Music] my name is george william and i work in the motion pictures broadcasting and recorded sound division and i've been with library of congress for 37 years when i started i was a vault collection attendant and one of the boats i was given to inspect was the thomas edison collection so i'm going through it and i came across several cans throughout the collection that were marked the great train robbery well of course i knew about the great train robbery very important film even at that time i'd seen it quite often uh one of them was marked with duke negative so uh you know open the can to check it no deterioration but i started looking at this reel because it didn't look like a duke negative i didn't know a whole lot about film then but i knew what an original negative looked like and this looked like one so we called down one of our experts from the lab and he took a look at it looked it all over and said this is an original negative so it turned out that we had the original camera negative of the great train robbery from 1903 and we still have it it's up in our vaults here in culpepper it is still not deteriorating it can still be used to make new material

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 1,528

Rating: 4.5294118 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress

Id: d-pQ4P40dJU

Length: 1min 21sec (81 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021