The Real National Treasure
An Inside Look at the Library of Congress
A History Channel production, part of their Modern Marvels series.
A standard definition program, 16x9 aspect ratio, letterboxed in a 4x3 frame, with Dolby Digital stereo sound. The run time is about 47 minutes, and the main menu comes up fairly promptly after a brief FBI warning, and a History Channel splash. The disc is Line-21 Closed Captioned. The packaging is a standard DVD case. Retail price for this title is $24.95, and has a USA street date of September 28, 2010.
The program originally aired on June 10, 2010.
The Feature — 
½
In the spirit of full disclosure, I work about a 2.25 kilometers (straight line,) heading 280°, from the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building, in a building with the recently adopted tag line of “Real National Treasures.” When this title, with this title, came available for review, I had to admit... curiosity. That said:
This program, a 47 minute run-time episode of Modern Marvels, is a bit of a biography and an introduction to — a building. A collection. A governmental... body, in support of the US Congress. In support of the arts, culture, and history, not just of the United States, but of the world. But it is just an introduction. After all, in 47 minutes, this program is tasked with revealing a fairly poorly understood facility — one where millions of tourists visit per year, with no idea of what they are seeing. Most, like me, arrive as students on school trips, boy scouts, or international bus tours. Arrive. Walk in. Take a picture of the magnificent Reading Room, and maybe of one of the three remaining pristine condition vellum ~1450CE Gutenberg Bibles. And leave.
Not realizing that while the Library itself is not a lending library, it is truly one of the marvels of the cultural and scientific world. And it is also open for the public. Anyone sixteen or older can gain physical access to its collections.
And the collections, of course, are vast. One hundred forty five million items, occupying about 745 miles of shelves. Books, sheet music, maps, flutes, sculpture, scrolls, manuscripts, countless forms of audio and image recordings, and one of the largest collections of machinery for playing back obsolete recordings. And films, films, films, and more films, spread out over five impressive buildings in and around the Washington, DC area (to include Fort Meade, Maryland, and Culpeper, Virginia.)
And the Missions of the Library are almost as varied as its collections; the biggest being Collection, Preservation, Restoration, and, of course, making it available to its users, be they visitors to the Library in person, or via the Internet.
Which means that a 47 minute video, with bumpers and recapitulations around ad-breaks, is going to have to be just a very, very fast and brief overview. Particularly since this program also touches on the history, from the first Library that burned during the War of 1812. Fortunately, while it lingers here and there on some ‘key’ subjects — all of the ways that they preserve the information that they can obtain on their Stradivarius instruments, for example — they also talk about some of the more challenging aspects of their collection. Particularly related to the Home Theater Forum — nitrate films. [Nitrate films are film-stocks made on a plasticized mix of nitrocellulose and camphor. Nitrocellulose is also known as guncotton or even smokeless powder.]
The program touches on all of this and more, moving fairly briskly during its allotted time.
The Picture —
The picture is 16x9 standard definition video, letterboxed into a 4x3 frame. Much of the basic video is fairly clean, if a little soft. There was no significant edge enhancement or noise reduction to the picture, but it is still, fundamentally, a standard definition television production, produced, edited, and delivered in standard definition. Some scenes are a little noisy, courtesy of having to sometimes work in some fairly low-light situations.
The Sound —
The sound is mostly unexceptional. Clean and clear voice-over and background music here and there. Interviews vary in quality, depending on the amount of noise in the room where it was conducted. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to do very strong noise-reduction to those interviews, yielding a sort of fishy, underwater-sounding distortion to those interviews. A few of the interviews were conducted in grand galleries, and they were allowed to have some of the ‘space’ or ‘air’ of the room. On the whole, clean, intelligible, and suited toward a documentary.
The Extra
There is an approximately five minute ‘trailer’ for the Library of Congress, heavily cut together from numerous interviews, to have multiple divisions all working toward completing the same sentences, called The Library of Congress Experience.
In The End —
The biggest difficulty I have with this disc is not a technical issue. Technically, I have no significant complaints. Instead, it is the question of, where does this fit? I think this disc would find itself most at home in a school’s film library, where it might be shown to groups of students before they took a field trip to the District of Columbia. Or in a public library, for anyone thinking about vacationing in Washington, and looking for ‘things to do.’ Or perhaps, in either case, as a refresher: did you have any idea what was going on behind the walls? And while I am somewhat disappointed by the lack of depth to the program, I suspect one produced about my place of work would be similarly disappointing to me, for many the same reasons.
