Filmmakers and archivists at the Letcher County-based nonprofit Appalshop are making more steps toward flood recovery by preserving and digitizing much of their library.
Flooding destroyed much of their equipment and archived footage last year, alongside their headquarters in Whitesburg.
One year later, Appalshop is teaming with information storage company Iron Mountain to recover and store 9,000 magnetic audio and visual media items in a cold storage facility in Pennsylvania.
“I do feel like most of my coworkers would agree with me that it does feel like, as we've kind of entered into this month, we're finally just starting to feel like we kind of fully have our feet beneath us, which is crazy to think that it took as long as it does,” administrative director Nicole Smith said.
Appalshop is also currently working to recover and digitize non-magnetic items and photo negatives alongside groups like the New Jersey-based Specs Brothers and North Carolina-based AV Geeks. For paper documents and archives, they have an in-house storage unit that requires much less resources for recovery.
Smith said the preservation work is important not just because it helps tell the story of the institution, but also the stories of the people and families living in the region.
“That's their family photographs, that's recordings that they've donated to us, home movies that they've donated to us,” Smith said. “To me, nothing is more precious than that, then someone saying I trust Appalshop with this.”
Appalshop is still deciding on a permanent location for their operations, including figuring out what to do with their old Whitesburg headquarters. Last month, they moved into temporary office space in Jenkins.
“We’re still in a process of kind of learning more information from FEMA in terms of what's possible, what they would ask us to rebuild,” Smith said. “Because now we've gone through this flood, FEMA has certain requirements that we would need to consider if we were to stay at that space.”
Appalshop has information on how to support their flood recovery efforts on their website.
