The first job of my professional career was at the Library of Congress in the Motion Picture, Broadcast, and Recorded Sound Division working to digitize things

The first job of my professional career was at the Library of Congress in the Motion Picture, Broadcast, and Recorded Sound Division working to digitize things like this. First, it was a fascinating job because of how media has been stored over time. Most people think of records or even phonographs but there are wax cylinders, wire spool recordings, and a ton more. Unfortunately, many of them are so degraded that you couldn't play them. It wasn't later that they came up with the turning images to sound approach but we captured many of those original pictures. Second, the sheer volume of stuff was nuts. The Library had warehouses of uncatalogued things sitting around without a real plan to log them, let alone digitize them. While we had Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, the more fascinating thing about those is that copyright law at the time didn't have a way to address "moving pictures" so they did the only thing they could: copyrights on each individual frame. Yes, seriously. Luckily, at that point, it was only 15fps and movies were short. Edison's work got all the attention but there were tons more like the ones in this article that were simply lost to time.