Preserving Digital Public Television: Preparing for the Broadcast Afterlife
Just got word that The Informed Librarian
Online has selected an article from Against the
Grain as Editor's Picks. Each month a few
journal articles are highlighted for readers.
The April 2009 issue of The Informed
Librarian picked Bryan Carson's article
in the December 2008/January 2009 issue
(v.20#6
Preser ving Digital Public Television: Preparing for the Broadcast Afterlife
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Preserving Digital Public Television: Preparing
for the Broadcast Afterlife
“Public Television is responsible for the production, broadcast and dissemination
of programs which form the richest audiovisual source of cultural history in the
United States.” — Librarian of Congress, 1997
lent research and whose
graduates have become
full-time project staff.
New Preservation Practices for Television Archives
In less than a decade, television production,
distribution and preservation has undergone
a radical shift. Today, programs are nearly
all shot, edited, and shared as digital files.
Video recording and editing systems are now
well within the means of most members of
the public, and the ubiquity of media on the
Internet, coupled with the mass deployment
of hand-held devices, have transformed not
only the medium of television but the entire
environment for creating and watching
moving images.
Distribution and transmission have been
equally transformed, as tape-based submissions
to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
and other national program services are being
replaced by digital file transfers. On-demand
viewing is growing just as on-air signals
become all-digital, when every analog transmitter
is turned off in 2009.
What do these changes mean for television
archives? Practices to conserve and protect
videotape recordings are well established, and
the cost for maintaining and storing physical
media are easily calculated. However, in an age
of digital files, the requirements for preserving
television programs are far different from
storing videotape. It isn’t enough to close a digital
file and put it on a virtual shelf. For video in
particular, acceptable practices to save and
access very large files, manage ever-changing
file formats, and maintain rich metadata are
just now emerging.
Preserving Digital Public Television, a
project funded by the National Digital
Information and Infrastructure Program of
the Library of Congress (NDIIPP)1 set out
to solve some of these difficult problems by
designing a model repository for public
television. In the process, the project also determined
standards for metadata, explored rights issues
relating to video archives, analyzed operating
costs, and brought a new consciousness about
the importance of digital preservation to the
public television system.
Bringing Digital Preservation to Public Television
In the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967,
Congress authorized the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting (CPB) “to establish
and maintain, or contribute to, a library and
archives of noncommercial educational and
cultural radio and television programs and
related materials.” However, CPB never
allocated any funds to support this charge, and
no demand for system-wide preservation was
implemented. Consequently, only a few
stations have established formal archiving
activities to preserve their own materials.
Without a preservation mandate, digitally
produced programs in public television are at
great risk of being lost. The rapid changes
in digital technology are rendering recording
and playback systems obsolete at breakneck
speeds, at the same time adequate tools for
managing large and complex video files are
not yet perfected. This has left a very large
gap in the preservation of America’s public
television legacy.
Public television stations WNET in New
York and WGBH in Boston, which produce
roughly 60% of the national prime time series
including Frontline and NOVA at WGBH, and
American Masters and Great Performances
at WNET, recognized this challenge early.
Because WNET and WGBH each maintain
its own archives, the stations were already
committed to long-term program
preservation. Both knew that solving the demands of
digital preservation would be costly and that
no station could do it alone — it would take a
collaborative effort.
The Preserving Digital Public
Television Collaboration
When the Library of Congress invited
proposals under NDIIPP, WNET and WGBH
partnered with PBS to build a model
preservation repository for “born-digital” public
television programs. PBS operates the network that
distributes public television programs to more
than 300 stations, and because most national
programs pass through PBS before they are
aired, it is the principle de facto repository for
these programs. (The PBS warehouse holds
more than 150,000 videotapes of programs
going back more than 40 years).
These institutions understood that public
television had to take steps to protect its rapidly
growing collection of digital assets. As
broadcasters, however, they had little experience
building a preser (...truncated)