
A photo archive hidden inside a limestone mine - prismatic
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hidden-photo-archive-mine
======
adventured
You can see 203,929 photos from the Bettmann collection here (not without the
Getty watermark of course):

[https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/bettmann-
archive](https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/bettmann-archive)

It really is an extraordinary, striking collection. Bill Gates should have
donated it to an appropriate museum or similar (ideally public domain as much
of it as possible), instead of selling it to Visual China. A morally
reprehensible choice for someone worth $75 billion to make about one of the
world's most important visual archives of historical record & expression.

~~~
paganel
Apparently I can "purchase" an image of a "Mass Grave Site in Germany" filled
with what I can imagine are Jewish bodies for as "little" as 150 euros, 475
euros if I want to "purchase" the large format. This is so wrong on so many
levels, images like these should have been in the public domain since they
were first taken, and you're completely right, it's morally reprehensible what
a wealthy guy like Gates did.

Hell, I'm a collector of older photos myself, I'm orders of magnitude less
wealthy than Gates but I'm pretty sure I've invested a greater percentage of
my money in purchasing those old photos than Gates did, but I would never
think of asking for money for people to access those old photos (I've started
scanning and geo-locating some of them on this personal website [1], which is
already 8-year old now, so it might not look so great but the photos do open).

[1] [http://foto.maglina.ro/](http://foto.maglina.ro/)

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snowwrestler
The headline, and much of the story, sort of implies that the underground
facility was built specifically for the photo archive.

It’s all the way at the end, but the archive is housed in the mine facility of
Iron Mountain, a storage company that folks with corporate experience might be
familiar with.

[https://www.ironmountain.com/](https://www.ironmountain.com/)

~~~
ganstyles
And to fans of Mr. Robot, the company in the show was based off of Iron
Mountain.

------
ruytlm
I think there is much to be said for storing physical media like photos and
microfilm, such that the only technology you need to recover the information
is a lens.

I am sure we are (and have been) losing valuable troves of early digital
information, both through issues of hardware compatibility and corporate
governance.

Hardware, in that the only reason I still have a CD drive at all is because I
haven't replaced one old computer. Hard to read data on a CD without a CD
drive.

Corporate governance, in that it seems every few months there is yet another
frantic scramble by the community to back up an aging web service that has
been deemed too expensive to maintain by its owner.

I expect there is a huge amount of information in this part of the digital age
that in 50 years time will be gone simply because we are not actively
preserving it due to a belief that it will always be there.

~~~
namibj
The problem with these analog formats is inherent generation loss, and the
inability to make use of error correction codes.

While yes, that is true, there is an argument about formats as wide-spread as
CD-R, DVD-R, and BD-R/BD-R-DL. Readers for these are made by many companies,
and information on how to make them is wide spread. They're also just
sufficiently-precise mechanics with rather trivial optics.

Does your CD drive also read DVDs? I'd guess so.

Archive team is (thankfully) doing a good job. Go support them, and the
Internet Archive!

I do not hold that belief you worry about. I'd like to collaborate on that
front, not actually targeting immediate accessibility like the internet
archive, but rather comparably to what that mine does. Well, maybe with less
focus on active, short-term retrieval, and more on just waiting until it's
feasible to keep it on active HDDs.

~~~
Piskvorrr
There's an orthogonal problem: does your DVD drive read CDs? I mean, sure it
does, on the abstract level of compatibility; but the _material_ of the
physical data carriers degrades. Audio CDs from the 1990s are still listenable
(as there's far more error correction going on in the ear of the beholder),
but data CDs? Not good, and getting worse.

And that's not to mention magnetic tapes, where the charge fades even
faster...

~~~
namibj
BaFe tapes don't seem to have issues with "data fading". And BD-R uses phase-
change recording, which is very, very stable and not affected by fungi or
other ways the dye tends to rot/degrade in CD-R/DVD-R.

Modern, high-coercitivity magnetic data tape only really has issues with
hydrolysis of the binder that holds the magnetic particles to the PET film.
This is prevented by very, very dry storage under about 15 degree Celsius. See
e.g. this chart: [https://i0.wp.com/clir.wordpress.clir.org/wp-
content/uploads...](https://i0.wp.com/clir.wordpress.clir.org/wp-
content/uploads/sites/6/2017/02/figure_10.gif)

Further reading:
[https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/estimation_of_les/](https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/estimation_of_les/)

------
lqet
In the mountain behind my home is a similar archive, the Barbarastollen. The
documents stored there on microfilm in containers contain stuff like the
original building plans of the Cologne Cathedral, the Golden bull, the
coronation certificate of Otto the Great, or Bach's handwritten manuscripts.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_arc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen_underground_archive)

The German wikipedia page has some interesting photos:

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarastollen)

~~~
lb1lf
Thank you for the link, that Wikipedia entry was pure engineering porn.

------
wbraun
It's a shame that copyright works in such a way that it allows all these old
and historic pictures to be sequestered away from the public long after all
the original creators are gone.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
'Allows'? This was somebody's life's work, sold to somebody else and so on.
They can do anything they want with it.

I get it; I'd like to see some of those old photos too. But I didn't spend a
lifetime collecting and collating them. So I guess I'll have to settle for
what I can pay for now.

~~~
ryukafalz
Yes, "allows." Copyright lasting as long as it does today is not a natural
state of the world; it's a decision that was made by people. If we had the
copyright laws today that we had at the founding of the United States, all of
these photos would have long since entered the public domain. If we had the
copyright laws that we had until 1976, most of them would be.

Many people, myself included, don't believe that copyright should last nearly
as long as it does today.

Now, not that this has much to do with the physical collection, of course;
physical property is different. But if you can obtain a copy of one of these
photos, in my opinion at this point you should be able to do what you want
with it.

~~~
BurningFrog
I don't think "copyright" is the right way to think about a private collection
of physical objects.

~~~
ryukafalz
Not the physical collection itself, of course, but it definitely does apply to
this part:

>When Gates moved the collection into the mine, he simultaneously erected a
digital paywall, thereby securing the collection across both physical and
digital space.

~~~
kbutler
Or, to rephrase, he created digital copies and made them available, requiring
a fee for the service. (Just as bertmann had required fees).

This instance is more an argument in favor of long copyrights than against
them, because without copyright, there would have been no bertmann archive to
begin with, and without the long copyright, it wouldn't have been preserved
and digitized. (See the sorry state of early Hollywood film archives).

That said, I absolutely agree that our current copyright regime is horribly
excessive, both in duration and in the hugely abused anti-circumvention
provisions.

------
dolmen
The oldest photographic archive of France, started in 1851, is hosted in a
fort built after the 1870 war to protect Paris. This photographic archive was
built to picture the monuments of France to protect them.

27 pictures of the site (including plans) to see here:
[https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/search/mosaic?base=%5B%22Pho...](https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/search/mosaic?base=%5B%22Photographies%20%28M%C3%A9moire%29%22%5D&image=%5B%22oui%22%5D)
Those pictures are themselves stored on that site.

One can visit the site when it opens for the Journées Européennes du
Patrimoine when such places with historical values are open to the public.
Well, probably not this year :(

Some of the photographs of this database are available online:
[https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/search/mosaic?base=%5B%22Pho...](https://www.pop.culture.gouv.fr/search/mosaic?base=%5B%22Photographies%20%28M%C3%A9moire%29%22%5D&image=%5B%22oui%22%5D)

~~~
dolmen
Another nearby fort (Fort de Bois d'Arcy) built for the same protection of
Paris is storing the archives of films, including some of the oldest movies in
the world (films by Lumière brothers).

[http://www.cnc-
aff.fr/internet_cnc/Home.aspx?Menu=MNU_ACCUEI...](http://www.cnc-
aff.fr/internet_cnc/Home.aspx?Menu=MNU_ACCUEIL)

------
mdturnerphys
There is a similar storage facility in a mountain east of Salt Lake City where
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints keeps geneological and church
records.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Mountain_%28Salt_Lake_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Mountain_%28Salt_Lake_County%2C_Utah%29)

------
davidjnelson
This is very similar to what the GitHub Archive is doing
[https://archiveprogram.github.com/](https://archiveprogram.github.com/)

~~~
dolmen
> The snapshot will include every repo with any commits between the
> announcement at GitHub Universe on November 13th and 02/02/2020, every repo
> with at least 1 star and any commits from the year before the snapshot
> (02/03/2019 - 02/02/2020), and every repo with at least 250 stars.

Looks like a good practice to have your own public projects archived forever
in the arctic is to star them yourself.

------
Animats
This started as Bill Gates' personal hobby business.

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ThePowerOfFuet
Illegal cookie wall. Can't read the content. :(

~~~
umvi
"Can't" or "won't"? FWIW, I never even saw the cookie wall, but I use uBlock
Origin.

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
Brave browser on iOS here. I also never saw it.

