Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Iron Mountain Trip

My first trip to Iron Mountain was in June 2014 with Chris. This time I went with Tracy to meet up with Fred, the Iron Mountain Digital Studios team & the folks at the Bettmann Archive. We recently relocated our entire film collection to our vault there & had meetings about digitizing our archive.

It's really an amazing place. Most people know Iron Mountain (founded in 1951) as a paper shredding company but it's much, much more! A few stats about the former limestone mine: 220 feet below ground, 2700 employees, 26 miles of roads & only one tenth of the mine is developed. The largest active vault is 220,000 square feet ... the size of 6 football fields!!! INSANE!!! The history is fascinating & security is really tight.

Definitely watch these 2 videos. The first one is about Iron Mountain & the second one is about the Bettmann Archive collection. It was so amazing to see the Bettmann Archive vault ... 20,000 square feet filled with the most famous photographs in the world.

The new visitor center

We were in a golf cart following Bethany & AJ underground.

Iron Mountain Digital Studios HQ.

One of the two Hasselhoff Hasselblad scanners being used to digitize our archive.

I'm not sure if Fred is inbound or outbound.

Tracy & I in our vault.

Fred checks out some of the boxes.

Everything is very well organized.

On my last trip here, I was so bummed I wasn't able to visit the amazing Bettmann Archive. This time, Leslie & Sarah gave us an awesome tour.

The broken glass plate negative of the historic 1932 image of "New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam" is stored in Pelican Cases.

When they opened a random drawer in the archive & I saw Lynn Goldsmith, I immediately asked if I could see some Bruce pix. So awesome!

Files upon files of the most famous photographs in the world!

Old card catalog

Ditka's for dinner with Tracy.

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