This Friday night, on the same date, the institute will celebrate entering its fourth decade, with events dedicated to music and film from the 1980s.

The NFSA was established in April 1984, before moving to its current location in Acton in October the same year, and current CEO Michael Loebenstein said the biggest changes the venue has seen are technological.

"The media landscape is one of the fastest-paced industries and is marked by the most disruptive technological changes, so change has been permanent for the past 30 years," he said.

The move towards digital has also meant the NFSA's collection is growing at a continually increasing pace.

"We are now at over 2 million collection items, and we celebrated 1 million not even a decade ago," he said.

"At this point in time we still are largely an archive of film reels, vinyl records, magnetic tape, documents and artefact. But between 2021 and 2025, our digital collection will have completely dwarfed our analogue collection."

Before the NFSA moved into its art deco venue, designed by the same architect as the Hyatt Hotel and Old Parliament House, the building served as the Institute of Anatomy.

The institute was most famous for housing Phar Lap's heart, which now resides at the National Museum of Australia, but according to Loebenstein, "people still assume we have his heart in the basement".

One of the significant changes to the building over the years has been the conversion of one of the old galleries into the Arc Cinema, which will hold a special screening of Peter Weir's Gallipoli as part of Friday night's celebrations.

Loebenstein said the night will also include a tribute to the 1980s in the Vinyl Lounge, and the screening of items from the archive's television collection, "just to make everyone cringe when they remember the 1980s".

The National Film and Sound Archives 30^th anniversary celebrations are on Friday October 3 from 5.30pm. All events are free, but some require tickets. Visit nfsa.gov.au for more information.