could access it to its fullest potential, he was able to
pursue in tandem his academic interests. He began
to write more frequently and collaborate in pub-
lishing books. Because his mind was subject-
oriented, he had always wanted to publish books
that were subject-image oriented, and in the course
of his lifetime he wrote, compiled, or contributed to
13 major publications.
Bettmann collected both singular images and
entire archives. In 1967, Bettmann purchased the
Gendreau Collection of Americana. In 1972 he
bought the famous Underwood and Underwood
Collection of negatives and prints from 1900 to
World War II. By 1980 the Bettmann Archive
housed over two million images for commercial
and academic use.
Bettmann often purchased rare books just to
photograph the contents. As he was not a rare
book collector, he would then sell them on. In
this capacity, he made the acquaintance of H.P.
Krause, the famous rare-book dealer in New
York who, in the late 1950s offered to buy Bett-
mann’s entire archive. Bettmann at that time was
not ready to sell, but he remembered the offer years
later when he was considering retirement. Bett-
mann decided to accept the offer and in 1981 the
Bettmann picture archive was acquired by the now
Krause-Thompson Archive. By 1984 Krause-
Thompson had also acquired the picture archives
of the press agencies United Press International
(UPI) and Reuters, bringing the number of collec-
tive images in the archive into the millions.
After the sale, Bettmann and his wife moved to
Boca Raton, Florida, where Bettmann held an
adjunct professorship at Florida Atlantic Univer-
sity for several years. At the age of 89 he became
the rare-book librarian at FAU’s newly con-
structed S.E. Wimberly Library. In 1992 he pub-
lished his autobiography Bettmann: the Picture
Man(1992), and in 1995 published his biography
of Bach entitledJohann Sebastian Bach, As His
World knew Him(1995).
Otto Bettmann died on May 3, 1998. The
research files and manuscripts of his last years
form the Bettmann Collection and are found in
the Special Collections/Archives at the S.E. Wim-
berly Library at Florida Atlantic University and
relate primarily to his tenure at FAU (1978–1996).
In the 1980s, with Microsoft Corporation con-
suming digitalized images for its software, Bill
Gates founded Corbis, now an international pic-
ture agency with offices in New York, Los Angeles,
Chicago, London, Paris, Du ̈sseldorf, Vienna, Hong
Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo. The intent was
to capture the globalization of advertising markets
using digital imagery. Corbis wanted to provide an
agency that offered creative professionals such as
filmmakers, publishers, advertisers, and designers,
easy access to a wealth of images.
Corbis has access to many outside picture sources
and partners itself with individual photographers,
image companies, museums, and archives. For film
footage Corbis works with Paramount Pictures,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sharpshooters, CNN, ES-
PN, Hearst Entertainment, Northeast Historic Film,
and Universal Newsreel in addition to several sports-
media companies. For illustrations they are part-
nered with Images.com and QA digital; and for
fine art, Alinari, Christie’s, the Louis K. Meisel
Gallery, Inc., Archivo Iconiografico, S.A., the Phi-
ladelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery in
London, the State Hermitage, Russia, and the Brett
Weston Archive.
In the mid 1990s Corbis acquired the news
agency archives of Sygma, Saba, the celebrity
archive ‘Outline,’ and other smaller photo-journal-
ist archives, stock-houses, and photo agencies. In
1995, Corbis acquired the Thomas/Krause Archive
with its holdings from UPI, Reuters, and the famed
Bettmann Archive, bringing the Corbis image bank
to approximately 70 million. As well, Corbis has
access through various agreements, to the Hulton-
Deutsche Collection, Newsport, Conde ́ Nast
Archive, Brand X, and Image 100, the last two
holding royalty-free imagery.
The acquisition of the historic Bettmann Archive
brought with it, however, the problem of preserva-
tion, and in some cases, emergency preservation.
Many of the 11 million physical objects housed in
antiquated buildings with fluctuating temperatures,
acid based filing materials, and water-damage were
in danger of disappearing.
All photographic materials are organically
based and biodegradable. At the turn of the twen-
tieth century, gelatin, carrying light-sensitized sil-
ver, was used to produce individual glass plate
negatives, which were the standard form of nega-
tive making. Gelatin is still the vehicle for the
light-sensitive chemical used in both film and
paper. George Eastman, in his entrepreneurial
enthusiasm, wanted to simplify the picture making
process for the amateur picture maker, and put a
camera in everyone’s hand by developing a flexible
film. His success resulted in tremendous stores of
photographs that accumulated in the twentieth
century. However, the materials he used for the
flexible film base were cellulose nitrate (first mar-
keted in 1889 and very unstable) then cellulose di-
acetate, more stable than its predecessor but still
biodegradable and most recently, a polyester baseCORBIS/BETTMANN