Preserving Digital Public Television: Preparing for the Broadcast Afterlife

Against the Grain, Nov 2013

By Nan Rubin, Published on 11/01/13

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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 - 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)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2550&context=atg

Nan Rubin. Preserving Digital Public Television: Preparing for the Broadcast Afterlife, Against the Grain, 2013, Volume 21, Issue 2,