Packard Humanities Institute

• 1. Introduction

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  The Packard Humanities Institute sits in Los Altos, California, where a small non-profit has quietly built one of the most unusual research collections in the world. Founded in 1987, it funds work that spans ancient Greek inscriptions, Latin literature, the complete compositions of C.P.E. Bach, and millions of reels of film. What draws all of this together? And how did a single foundation end up inside a mountain in Virginia, inside an old Federal Reserve vault, and inside a converted Fox Theatre in San Jose?

• 2. Databases and Texts

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  Latin literature, Bible texts, Arabic and Coptic writings, Ancient Greek papyri and inscriptions, and Persian literature in translation are among the databases the institute has assembled over the years. The Founding Fathers of the United States, including Benjamin Franklin, are also represented. PHI funds external scholarly projects as well, including the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. The goal running through all of it is the creation of tools for basic research in the Humanities. Greek epigraphy, the study of inscriptions carved into stone or metal, is a particular focus alongside the broader digital text work. David Woodley Packard, a former professor who serves as the institute's current president, has shaped this scholarly direction. He has served as a director of Hewlett Packard but never as an officer, and the institute itself is entirely independent of both the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and any Hewlett-Packard Company foundations.

• 3. Inside Mount Pony

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  In 1997, with the approval of the United States Congress, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation purchased a former high-security storage facility that the Federal Reserve Board had once operated inside Mount Pony in Culpeper, Virginia. Working with Congress and the Library of Congress, the foundation transformed that Cold War-era vault into something unexpected: a national center for audiovisual preservation. Construction completed in mid-2007, and the facility became known as the Packard Campus, formally the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation. It is a gift to the nation, funded by the Packard Humanities Institute. The Packard Campus houses nearly 7 million collection items, making it the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of motion pictures, television programs, radio broadcasts, and sound recordings. Staff at the facility support the National Film Preservation Board and maintain the national registries for both film and recorded sound.

• 4. Theaters Restored

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  The California Theater in San Jose was originally opened in 1927 as a Fox Theatre. It closed in 1973, and for three decades it sat dark. PHI renovated the building and reopened it in 2004; it is now the home of Opera San José. The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto has a different lineage. Designed by architects Weeks and Day, it originally opened in 1925. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation purchased and restored it in 1987, and today it is operated by the Stanford Theatre Foundation under David Woodley Packard's leadership.

• 5. Santa Clarita and Nitrate Film

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  Drawing on the experience of building the Packard Campus in Virginia, PHI opened a new facility in Santa Clarita, California, in 2014. The building holds film vaults for media preservation and is notable for containing one of the most modern vaults in existence for storing nitrate film, a highly flammable material that requires specialized conditions. The exterior of the Santa Clarita building is designed in ancient Greek architectural style, built with Italian marble; the interior takes its inspiration from the monastery of San Marco in Florence. PHI Santa Clarita partners with the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, jointly preserving both institutions' film libraries. The facility also holds 400,000 archive films from studios including Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Republic Pictures. Among its active projects is the transfer of the Hearst Metrotone News collection, a run of newsreels produced from 1915 to 1975, being scanned on a Scanity motion picture film scanner.

• 6. Sixty Thousand Coming Attractions

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  Since 2010, the Packard Humanities Institute Collection has been held at the Academy Film Archive. It is recognized as the largest known assemblage of theatrical trailers on film. More than 60,000 items make up the collection, including coming attractions, advertisements, theatrical snipes, film excerpts, television spots, and public service announcements. Theatrical snipes, the brief on-screen messages shown before a film asking audiences to silence phones or refrain from talking, are among the more ephemeral objects in the collection. These materials were rarely preserved with the same care as feature films, which makes the PHI collection an unusual resource for scholars studying how studios marketed films to audiences across the twentieth century. The Hearst Metrotone newsreels being transferred in Santa Clarita, covering six decades of news footage from 1915 to 1975, represent a comparable kind of document: moving images made for mass audiences and then largely forgotten.