One year after the flood, hundreds of cardboard boxes containing (almost) the entire Appalshop Archive collections of audiovisual media have been moved to Iron Mountain, a climate controlled storage facility in a former iron mine inside a mountain in Boyers, Pennsylvania. We are grateful to Iron Mountain for extending the life of this archive through financial support, cold storage, digital preservation, and support for upgrading our website.
Most of the media in the archive remains “trapped” on obsolete formats, frozen in time but unable to be heard or seen by the public without being digitized. A lot of this media also sustained flood damage, which puts it on a quicker timeline of physical deterioration. This opportunity to store these materials in a stable environment and accelerate the cleaning and digitizing process is a big step towards sharing these sounds, images and stories with the world.
