The Librarian of Congress after conferring with the National Film Preservation Board or NFPB will select 25 films from approximately 6,100 entries. These selections will be included in the United States National Film Registry.
The film preservation board meets yearly to select 25 "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films." Members of the board pick from films nominated from a wide pool. All films must be at least 10 years old at the time that they are nominated.
The film registry is a list of films that are not the best American films of all time but have enduring importance to American culture. There are 825 films on the registry as of December 14th, 2021. The next 25 will be added in December. The oldest film is a fragment made in 1891 and is only a few seconds long. The registry was created because there were efforts in the 1980s to manipulate and alter how movies were made, distributed, protected, and saved made Congress act to preserve those films. Anyone can nominate up to 50 films to be included in the registry. The only requirements are that the films be American produced and should be originally created on film stock. The criteria does not specifically bar television programs or commercials.
To see what's already on the registry follow this link:
The NFPB was established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988 and is a federal agency located within the Library of Congress (LOC). This board is made up of persons appointed by the Library of Congress. The board members are selected from the following organizations: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, American Film Institute, Directors Guild of America, National Society of Film Critics, Screen Actors Guild, The Writers Guild of America, and other organizations devoted to film. The board members are 44 people who are experts, scholars, critics, actors, writers, producers, directors, archivists, and librarians.
The center for preservation is in the Packard Campus at Culpeper, Virginia. The facility has the latest technology for the archiving and preservation of films and is home to more than 9.2 million collection items.
In 2021, among the 25 selected were WALL-E (2008), Strangers on a Train (1951), Selena (1997), Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979), Return of the Jedi (1983), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and Chicana (1979). This shows that the films selected range from documentaries to avant-garde to box office smashes.
The Packard Campus is a 45-acre location and has a digital storage archive capable of storing over a petabyte (a million gigabytes) of information. It has "globally unprecedented capabilities and capacities for the preservation reformatting of audio-visual media formats of all audio visual media formats (including obsolete formats dating back 100 years)."
Films chosen to be included in the registry will be procured from the source with the best quality and placed in a secure vault at Culpeper to be enjoyed forever. The effort means that those films chosen by the board will be preserved from deterioration and cared for by a group of scholars, collectors, and other film enthusiasts and listed in the registry. Nominations will be accepted until August 15th, 2022 follow here for submission.
https://loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/nominate