TV/Video Preservation Study: Volume 1: Report - National Film Preservation Board (Library of Congress)


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Television/Video Preservation Study: Volume 1: Report

ISBN: 0-8444-0946-4

[Note: This is a plain, ASCII version of the report. Footnote text will
be added and linked to the footnote numbers in coming days. In coming weeks,
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TELEVISION AND VIDEO PRESERVATION 1997

A Report on the Current State of American Television

and Video Preservation

Volume 1

October 1997

REPORT OF THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS

TELEVISION AND VIDEO PRESERVATION 1997

A Report on the Current State of American Television
and Video Preservation

Volume 1: Report

Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.
October 1997

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Television and video preservation 1997: A report on the
current state of American television and video
preservation: report of the Librarian of Congress.
p. cm.
þThis report was written by William T. Murphy, assigned to
the Library of Congress under an inter-agency agreement with
the National Archives and Records Administration, effective
October 1, 1995 to November 15, 1996"--T.p. verso.
þSeptember 1997."
Contents: v. 1. Report --
ISBN 0-8444-0946-4
1. Television film--Preservation--United States. 2.
Video tapes--Preservation--United States. I. Murphy,
William Thomas II. Library of Congress.
TR886.3 .T45 1997
778.59'7'0973--dc 21
97-31530

CIP

Table of Contents

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Preface by James H. Billington, The Librarian of Congress .
Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1. Introduction
A. Origins of Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
B. Scope of Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
C. Fact-finding Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
D. Urgency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
E. Earlier Efforts to Preserve Television . . . . . . .
F. Major Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

2. The Materials and Their Preservation Needs
A. Films Made for Television and Kinescope Recordings
B. Videotape Recordings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3. Television and Video Preservation in Practice in Corporate
and Public Archives
Corporate:
A. Major Studios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
B. Television Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . .
C. Public Television . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Largest Public Archives:
A. Library of Congress . . . . . . . . . . . . .
B. UCLA Film and Television Archive. . . . . . .

Specialized Public Archives--A Selection:
A. National Archives and Records Administration.
B. Public Affairs Video Archives . . . . . . . .
C. Political Commercial Archive. . . . . . . . .
D. New York Public Library Collections . . . . .
E. Awards Associations . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Broadcasting Museums:
A. Museum of Television and Radio. . . . . . . .
B. Museum of Broadcast Communications. . . . . .

4. Local Television News Archives. . . . . . . . . . . . .
5. Video Art and Independent Video . . . . . . . . . . . .

6. Access
A. Educational Value. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
B. Obstacles to Access. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7. Current Funding for Preservation. . . . . . . . . . . .

8. A National Plan: Recommendations for Safeguarding and
Preserving the American Television and Video Heritage.

Appendices (not in this Internet version)

A. Federal Register Notice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

B. A Selective Chronology of Events Relating to
Television and Video Archives . . . . . . . . . . .

C. Holdings of Television and Video Materials in Public
Archives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

D. A Report on Television Commercials . . . . . . . . . . .

E. Recommendations Submitted by Witnesses . . . . . . . . .

F. International Federation of Television Archives, Draft
Recommended Standards and Procedures for Selection For
Preservation of Television Programmes (September 1995) .

G. A Sample Duplication Rate Sheet from ABC News. . . . . .

H. A Suggested Manufacturer's Label for Video Cassettes to
Encourage Proper Handling and Storage. . . . . . . . . .

I. List of Television and Video Databases . . . . . . . . .

J. Letter Concerning Off-air Recording from Steve Bryant,
National Film and Television Archive, London . . . . . .

K. Chronological History of Videotape Formats (courtesy Jim
Wheeler). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

LIST OF FIGURES

Table 1: Videotape Storage Recommendations. . . . . . . . .

Table 2: Videotape Formats. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Table 3: Selected Analog Videotape Formats. . . . . . . . .

Table 4: Digital Videotape Formats. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Table 5: Studiosþ Average Storage Conditions. . . . . . . .

Table 6: Some Studio Statistics for Television Materials. .

Table 7: ABC Film and Videotape Inventory . . . . . . . . .

Table 8: CBS Film and Videotape Inventory . . . . . . . . .

Table 9: NBC Film and Videotape Inventory . . . . . . . . .

Table 10: National Public Broadcasting Archives:
Videotape/Kinescope Inventory . . . . . . . . . .

Table 11: WGBH Media Archives and Preservation Center
Inventory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Acknowledgements

The writer of this report--William T. Murphy--would like to
thank the many organizations that have provided highly
relevant information and the many individuals who provided
written materials, shared their ideas, and made thoughtful
recommendations. In addition, the writer would like to thank
Steve Leggett, Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division, Library of Congress, for lending his valuable
organizational skills to the project and for his timely
assistance when most needed.

Edie Adams
Peter Adelstein Image Permanence Institute
Gray Ainsworth Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Rebecca Bachman Walker Arts Center
Jim Baggett Birmingham (AL) Public Library
Erik Barnouw Professor Emeritus, Columbia
University
Laurie Baty National Historical Publications and
Records Commission
Roger Bell Fox, Inc.
William Boddy CUNY, Baruch College and Graduate
Center
Lisle Brown Marshall University, Morrow Library
Robert Browning Purdue University Public Affairs
Video Archives
Steve Bryant National Film and Television
Archive/British Film Institute
Frank Burke University of Maryland, College of
Library and Information Science
John Caldwell California State University, Long
Beach, Film and Electronic Arts
Department
John Cannon National Academy of Television Arts
and Sciences
Elizabeth Cardman University of Illinois Libraries
Kitty Carlisle Hart New York State Council for the Arts
Paolo Cherchi-Usai George Eastman House International
Museum of Photography and Film
Kathy Christensen CNN
Glenn Clatworthy Public Broadcasting Service
Kenneth Cobb New York City Municipal Archives
Nancy Cole NBC News
Edward Coltman Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Thomas Connors National Public Broadcasting Archives,
University of Maryland
John Craddock Home Box Office
Judy Crichton WGBH
Thomas Cripps Morgan State University, Department
of History
Pia Cseri-Briones Visual Studies Workshop
Steven Davidson Louis Wolfson II Media History
Center
Don Decesare Crossroads Communications LLC
Dan Den Bleyker Mississippi Dept. of Archives and
History
Karen DeSeve Eastern State (WA) Historical Society
Ernie Dick Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Thomas Doherty Brandeis University, Film Studies
Program
Dan Einstein UCLA Film and Television Archive
Harrison Ellenshaw Walt Disney Company
Richard Engeman University of Washington Libraries
Wayne Everard New Orleans Public Library
Richard Fauss West Virginia Division of Culture and
History
Raymond Fielding Florida State University, School of
Film and Television
Sally Fifer Bay Area Video Coalition
Paul Fleckenstein Sioux City (IA) Public Museum
Maxine Fleckner Ducey Wisconsin Center for Film and
Theater Research
Stephen Fletcher Indiana Historical Society
David Francis Library of Congress, Motion Picture
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division
Michael Friend Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Academy Film Archive
Steven Gamble University of Georgia, WSB Television
Newsfilm Archive
Peter Gardiner Warner Bros.
Martin Gaston The News Library
Gerald George National Historical Publications and
Records Commission
Linda Giannecchini National Academy of Television Arts
and Sciences (Northern
California Chapter)
Douglas Gibbons Museum of Television and Radio
Gerry Gibson Library of Congress, Preservation
Research and Testing Division
Charlene Gilbert Noyes Sacramento Archives and Museum
Collection Center
Douglas Gomery University of Maryland, College Park,
College of Journalism
Allan Goodrich John F. Kennedy Library
Jane Greenberg University of Pittsburgh, School of
Library and Information Science
Ray Greene Boxoffice
Robert Haller Anthology Film Archives
Rosemary Hanes Library of Congress, Motion Picture
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division
John Hatfield New Museum of Contemporary Art
Kathleen Haynes University of Oklahoma,
Political Commercial Archive
Robert Heiber Chace Productions, Inc.
Judi Hoffman Library of Congress, Motion Picture,
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division, National Digital
Library
Kate Horsfield Video Data Bank
William Humphrey Sony Pictures Entertainment
Barbara Humphrys Library of Congress, Motion Picture
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division
Mary Ide WGBH
William Jarvis WETA-TV
Joyce Jefferson The Weather Channel
Margaret Jerrido Temple University, Urban Archives
Mona Jimenez Media Alliance
Catherine Johnson Dance Heritage Coalition
Leith Johnson Wesleyan University Cinema Archives
Greg Jones A&E Network
Bill Judson Carnegie Museum of Art
Karen Kalish NT Audio
Fay Kanin Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences
Joel Kanoff ABC News
Lillian Katz Port Washington (NY) Public Library
David Kepley National Archives and Records
Administration
Grace Lan Bay Area Video Coalition/National Alliance
of Media Arts and Culture
Michael Lang ABC Broadcast Operations and
Engineering
David Lavoie
Fred Layn Quantegy
Dan Leab Seton Hall University
Lynda Lee Kaid University of Oklahoma, Political
Commercial Archive
Graham Leggat Media Alliance
Alan Lewis National Archives and Records
Administration
Lawrence Lichty Northwestern University, Dept.
of Radio/Television/Film
Grace Lile CNN New York Bureau
David Liroff WGBH-TV
Barbara London Museum of Modern Art
James Loper Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences
Patrick Loughney Library of Congress, Motion Picture
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division
Gregory Lukow National Center for Film and Video
Preservation, American Film
Institute
Karen Lund Library of Congress, Motion Picture,
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division, National Digital
Library
John Lynch Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Scott MacQueen The Walt Disney Company
Shaner Magalhþes State Historical Society of Iowa
Madeline Matz Library of Congress, Motion Picture
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division
Dick May Turner Entertainment Co.
Roger Mayer Turner Entertainment Co.
Charles Mayn National Archives and Records
Administration
Allan McConnell Library of Congress, Motion Picture
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division
Betsy McLane International Documentary Association
Annette Melville
Dara Meyers-Kingsley Andy Warhol Foundation
Sara Meyerson Strawhat Productions
Sherry Miller Hocking Experimental Television Center
Phil Murphy Paramount Pictures
Gerald Newborg State Historical Society of North
Dakota
Madeleine Nichols New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts, Dance Collection
Maureen O'Brien Will Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America
Cary O'Dell Museum of Broadcast Communications
Bill O'Farrell National Archives of Canada
Bob O'Neil Universal City Studios
Eric Paddock Colorado Historical Society
Ellie Peck New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts, Dance Collection
Louise Pfotenhauer Neville Public Museum of Brown County
(WI)
Marge Ponce ABC Entertainment
Francis Poole University of Delaware Library
Kenn Rabin
Joe Rader University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Libraries
Charles Rand University of Oklahoma, Political
Commercial Archive
James Rhoads Western Washington University, Center
for Pacific Northwest
Edward Richmond UCLA Film and Television Archive
Barbara Ringer Library of Congress, Register of
Copyrights Emeritus
Robert Rosen UCLA Film and Television Archive
Joanne Rudof Yale University, Fortunoff Video
Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
Diane Ryan Chicago Historical Society
Robert Saudek
Peter Schade Turner Entertainment Co.
Fay Schreibman McGrew Multimedia Trading Company
Eric Schwartz Smith and Metalitz, L.L.P.
Mary Schwartz University of Baltimore, Langsdale
Library
Ruth Schwer News Hour with Jim Lehrer
Wendy Shay Smithsonian Institution, National
Museum of American History
Milt Shefter Miljoy Enterprises
Barry Sherman University of Georgia, School of
Journalism
Debbie Silverfine New York State Council on the Arts
Scott Simmon
Lynn Spigel University of Southern California,
School of Cinema-Television
George Stevens, Jr.
Michael Stier Cunningham Dance Foundation
Laura Street LSU in Shreveport, Noel Memorial
Library
Linda Sue Hagood
Dan Sullivan CBS Television City
Elizabeth Sullivan CNN, Washington Bureau
Sam Suratt
Harry Sweet
Winston Tabb Library of Congress, Associate
Librarian for Library Services
Linda Tadic University of Georgia, Peabody Award
Archive
Francine Taylor Alaska Moving Image Preservation
Association
Edwin Thanhouser Thanhouser Company Film Preservation,
Inc.
Toni Treadway International Center for 8mm Film and
Video
Larry Urbanski Moviecraft, Inc.
John Van Bogart National Media Lab
Jac Venza WNET-TV
Jos‚ Villegas New Mexicoo State Records Center and
Archives
Stephen Vitiello Electronic Arts Intermix
Les Waffen National Archives and Records
Administration
Gloria Walker Deep Dish TV Network/Educational
Video Center
Duane Watson New York Public Library
Dean Watts Warner Bros.
David Weiss Northeast Historic Film
David Wexler Hollywood Vaults
Helene Whitson San Francisco Bay Area Television
Archive, San Francisco State
University
Bonnie Wilson Minnesota Historical Society
Pam Wintle Smithsonian Institution, Human
Studies Film Archives
Ken Wlaschin National Center for Film and Video
Preservation, American Film
Institute
Lisa Wood University of Kentucky, Margaret King
Library
Ed Zeier Universal City Studios

Task Forces Members:

"Preservation" Task Force:

Deirdre Boyle Associate Professor, The New School for
Social Research
Peter Brothers President/Managing Member, SPECS BROS.,
LLC
David Chilson Manager, Systems Planning, ABC Broadcast
Operations and Engineering
James Lindner President, Vidipax, Inc.
James Wheeler President, Tape Archival and Restoration
Services

"Access" Task Force:

Janet Bergstrom Associate Professor, Department of
Film and Television,
UCLA, and representing the Society
for Cinema Studies
Grover Crisp Director of Asset Management, Film
and Tape Operations, Sony
Pictures Entertainment
David Culbert Editor, Historical Journal of Film, Radio,
and Television; Professor of History, Louisiana
State University, Baton Rouge
Michael Curtin Director, Cultural Studies Program,
Indiana University
Doug McKinney Director of Archives, CBS News
Deanna Marcum President, Commission on Preservation and
Access
Stan Singer Manager, NBC News Archives

"Funding" Task Force:

Mary Lea Bandy Chief Curator, Dept. of Film and Video,
Museum of Modern Art
Robert Batscha President, Museum of Television and Radio
Dan Curtis President, Dan Curtis Productions
Lynda Lee Kaid Director, Political Communications
Center/Political Commercial
Archive, Univ. of Oklahoma, Norman
James Loper Executive Director, Academy of
Television Arts and
Sciences

Preface by:
James H. Billington, The Librarian of Congress

Television affects our lives from birth to death. Most
Americans inform and entertain themselves through it, and we
use it to distract our children by providing (to paraphrase a
famous quote) þchewing gum for their eyes.þ Sadly, we have
not yet sought to preserve this powerful medium in anything
like a serious or systematic manner. At present, chance
determines what television programs survive. Future scholars
will have to reply on incomplete evidence when they assess the
achievements and failures of our culture.

The 1992 National Film Preservation Act directed me, with
advice from the National Film Preservation Board, 1) to
prepare a study on the state of American film preservation and
2) then to design an effective program to improve current
practices and to coordinate the preservation efforts of
studios, archives and others. With cooperation from the film
community, the Library of Congress completed the study and
plan, and is now implementing the planþs recommendations. The
plan called for a similar initiative involving television and
video.

The 1976 Copyright Act established the American
Television and Radio Archive in the Library of Congress.
Since then we have acquired a treasure house of television
programs in the form of copyright deposits or gifts. We have
the entire output of National Educational Television and its
successor, the Public Broadcasting System; all of NBCþs extant
entertainment programs; the main network evening news
transmissions-- through an arrangement with Vanderbilt
University; tapes of floor proceedings from the U.S. Senate
and House of Representatives, and much more. The Act also
gave us a modest annual budget to enhance, preserve, document
and make available the archive of American television.

The Library has prepared this report in just a little
over a yearþs time under the leadership of William Murphy of
the National Archives and Records Administration. Hearings in
Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. enabled a wide
variety of interested parties to testify in person. Nearly
100 individuals and institutions submitted written statements.
The academic community stressed both the importance of
television as a source material for the study of history, and
the difficulties in gaining access for educational use to
programs which have survived. Production companies and
network executives suggested innovative ways to make news
programming available to the academic community.

Television artists are rightly sensitive about living
life in the shadow of cinema. Their achievements should be
honored in their own forum, and individual donors should be
able to direct their generosity toward safeguarding the
television and video heritage just as they do for cinema.

Lack of resources is a major problem identified in this
report: and the plan presents some innovative fund-raising
proposals to help protect our television and video heritage.

I thank the members of the National Film Preservation
Board for their help, counsel and testimony. I also commend
the Association of Moving Image Archivists, an organization
that has succeeded shown over the last few years in uniting
under a single banner preservationists in the industry and
nonprofit archives, in order to help us implement the
recommendations in this report. The Library of Congress has
invested considerable resources in preparation of this report.
We are therefore encouraged to know that the community that
will benefit from the planþs ambitious ideas has volunteered
to help bring them into reality.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The American television and video heritage is at risk. Early
television was broadcast live, kinescope or film copies were
made selectively, other programs were deliberately destroyed,
and videotapes were erased and recycled, still an unfortunate
practice in the production of local television news.
Television film and videotape vulnerability to deterioration
further imperils this rich heritage, and additional videotape
recordings may be lost to posterity if archival programs do
not address format obsolescence.

That this heritage is worth preserving is a major theme of
this report. Archival holdings of television and video
materials have enormous educational and cultural value, as
recognized in the American Television and Radio Archives Act
(1976) and expressed in the testimony of educators who
participated in Library of Congress's public hearings. Public
archives are obliged to preserve television materials because
of the popularity of television in American society and
because of educational interests that focus on television's
interactive role in numerous social and political processes.
Our heritage would be diminished if this vast record of our
culture is allowed to vanish. Inaction will eventually take
its toll.

The scope of the report includes television and video
materials in all their major dimensions: entertainment,
nonfiction, news and public affairs, public television, local
television news, video art, and independent video. Motion
picture film made for television is included because film
along with videotape has played a fundamental role in
television production since its earliest days. Just as the
Library of Congress spearheaded the initiative to assess the
general state of American film preservation in 1993, it is
appropriate that the Library, the home of the Congressionally-
authorized American Television and Radio Archive (ATRA),
assume a similar leadership role in assessing the state of
American television and video preservation. Two key
objectives of the report are to lay down a factual foundation
for understanding the issues confronting the preservation of
American television and video, and to recommend a national
plan of action based upon a broad consensus of the archival
community.

Major Findings

Educational access remains largely unattainable for
a variety of reasons, including underfunding in
public archives, lack of descriptive cataloging and
reference copies, copyright interests and very
restrictive usage policies.

Scholars best qualified to judge the long-term
research value of television and video materials are
generally not given ample opportunity to participate
in decision making in public and corporate archives
on what will be saved and made available.
Consequently scholars do not believe archives can
always act in their best interests. The academic
community, however, is not prepared to put funding
into film preservation to ensure the availability of
the programs it needs for teaching and research
purposes.

Few television programs held by the major studios
and networks are destroyed as a result of deliberate
decisions or policies. The growth of the cable
industry, video cassettes, multimedia, and overseas
sales has encouraged the preservation of television
and video materials. Each of the eight major studios
that have produced extensive prime time programming
has an assets protection program that includes film
and television inventories. Past programs are
protected rather than destroyed since they represent
the real asset value of the corporations. Studios
have been able to implement strategies for the
preservation of videotape as part of managed
programs.

The network news divisions have the greatest
preservation difficulty because of the sheer
quantity of film footage and videotapes they
produce. The network archives are focused on the
daily production needs of broadcasters, constantly
posing a danger that precious images so important to
the collective memory of the American people will be
lost, altered, or destroyed. Every group that has
studied the selection of television for preservation
has concluded that all news programs should be
retained and preserved as aired. The major networks
have recently sought to improve storage conditions
and set up programs for the conversion of obsolete
or deteriorating videotapes.

Public television has always faced financial
uncertainty, relegating preservation to a low
priority. Yet, in the aggregate, public television
programming has recorded the rich cultural history
of the United States, especially in the performing
arts. The preservation provision of the Public
Broadcasting Act of 1967 has not been carried out,
and it is only with the signing of the 1993 PBS-
Library of Congress Agreement that there is a
systematic means for assuring that these programs
will be preserved.

The most devastating losses have already occurred
among news film and videotape files of local
television stations across the United States. These
losses were prompted by the switch from 16mm film to
3/4-inch U-matic for Electronic News Gathering in
the mid-1970's. Some 25 years (covering
approximately 1950-75) of American state and local
history were destroyed. Less than 10% of the news
film libraries survive in public archives. Even
today local news tapes are rarely kept more than a
week before they are recycled. About 20 states have
no local television news collections in public
archives, and very few libraries or archives take
advantage of the right to make and retain off-air
copies of daily newscasts. The Vanderbilt University
Television News Archive is the only archive to do so
at the network level.

The works of video artists and of independent video
producers also face a precarious existence. Few
productions have found their way into traditional
archives. Researchers find it difficult to
understand what was produced and what still exists.
Many of the earliest open reel tapes made on the
consumer format EIAJ have already decayed. No
comprehensive effort has been made to list, catalog,
or document, let alone preserve this remarkable
record of American history and culture.

Funding of television and video preservation has
been, in a word, inadequate. Foundations have
rejected video preservation grant applications
because of a perceived inadequacy of videotape as a
preservation medium. However inadequate funding for
motion picture preservation may appear, television
and video archivists look with envy at the programs
that have been set up to preserve American cinema.
Advocates of television and video materials feel
that their second-class status is no longer
justified.

Recommendations

The final part of the report constitutes a national plan of
action in four critical areas: preservation, access, funding,
and public awareness.

Preservation:

Promotes the concept of a shared responsibility for the
American television and video heritage, and calls for
public and corporate archives to rationalize and
coordinate their preservation programs to avoid
unnecessary duplication and ensure that no significant
portion of this heritage (held in collections throughout
the nation) is endangered.
Provides a working definition of video preservation as
part of a total management system and proposes
appropriate considerations and strategies with respect to
technological obsolescence of video formats, restoration,
and storage.
Reiterates the importance of the 1993 motion picture
study as guidance for safeguarding and preserving film
and addresses specific technical issues relating to
television film.
Defines the role of film and videotape in preservation
copying.
Recommends the establishment of a Video Preservation
Study Center to collect bibliographic materials,
manufacturersþ literature, and obsolete equipment.

Access

Encourages public and corporate archives to seek the
advice and guidance of scholars and educators to
establish appraisal standards and determine appropriate
selection guidelines.
Urges the identification of important television programs
and coverage of events each year to encourage prompt
availability in a public archives.
Urges local television stations to work closely with
advisory boards and local archives to halt further
destruction of local news coverage.
Recognizes the importance of video art and independent
video production and calls for increased efforts to
stimulate their collection.
Urges the support of public policies that encourage the
widespread dissemination of information through the
Internet and other sources, and asks for a national union
listing, a network of publicly shared databases, and a
comprehensive catalog of American television programs by
decade.
Suggests ways for increasing the physical availability of
television materials, minimizing regional or economic
barriers.
Urges the Library of Congress to use its current
authority under the Copyright Act of 1976 for off-air
taping to the fullest extent possible, and encourages
other libraries and archives to establish off-air
recording projects as authorized by the Copyright Act for
daily newscasts.
Identifies steps to make it easier for scholars and
educators to use television and video materials in their
research, writing, and teaching, and calls for interested
parties to intensify discussions (through conferences,
informal channels and other means), regarding copyright
and educational access to television and video archives.
Only through such dialogue can these difficult issues be
fully addressed and perhaps solved.

Funding

Recommends the establishment of an independent nonprofit
organization in the private sector to raise funds for
television and video preservation, to recognize through
an awards program individuals and organizations in this
endeavor, and to keep television and video preservation
at the forefront of the national archival agenda.
Urges public archives to build a consensus around the
principles of television and video preservation and make
them understandable to funding organizations, which
should then be more responsive to the needs of television
and video archives.
Asks federal agencies to improve coordination of their
much valued funding efforts.
Proposes discussions (among all affected parties) be held
regarding possibility of two new avenues of funding: a
dedicated sales tax and a share in future FCC auctions of
broadcast spectrum.
Asks the CPB to establish a preservation grants program
pursuant to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.
Recommends direct public appeals for donations through
appropriate archival programming.
Proposes the Library of Congress use off-air recordings
as a possible substitute for copyright deposit copies, if
such an operation could be funded by the industry.

Increasing Public Awareness

Recommends the creation of a National Registry of
television and video treasures at the Library of
Congress.
Encourages professional and industry organizations to
advance the cause of preservation through awards and
grants.
Identifies the need for a documentary about the problems
of television and video preservation aimed at general
audiences and potential funders.
Urges the inclusion of video art and independent video in
all public awareness campaigns.

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

A. Origins of Study

The origins of this study are interwoven with the history of
the film and television preservation movement in the United
States. It was in fact a film preservation study conducted by
the Librarian of Congress, under the National Film
Preservation Act of 1992, in consultation with the National
Film Preservation Board, that provided the particular impetus
to begin a study of the preservation status of American
television and video materials.(1) A key recommendation asked
for "a national study on the state of American television and
video materials." The Librarian decided to conduct the study
under the framework of the American Television and Radio
Archives(2) (ATRA) legislation incorporated into the 1976
Copyright Act. The recommendation emerged from the Library's
earlier study, Film Preservation 1993: A Study of the Current
State of American Film Preservation, which described the most
important problems facing film archives such as nitrate and
acetate film deterioration, color fading, and the need for
improved storage conditions. The earlier report and plan
included a full range of archival issues relating to moving
images relevant to the present discussion.

This report also re-defined film preservation, taking into
account the practices of the major studios and larger film
archives, and the accumulated experience and knowledge of
preservationists. For television and video preservation it is
not so much a question of re-definition as it is defining
preservation for the first time. Among the many reasons that
a cohesive, nationwide effort to safeguard and preserve
American television and video has yet to be organized is the
absence of an archival paradigm that could include the
impermanence of videotape with all its formats, the massive
volume of generated material, and the decentralized and
fragmentary nature of production processes in the United
States compared to those of other countries. Preservation, to
be sure, is central to the discussion, but whatever success
the archival community has been able to achieve has been in
the absence of an agreed-upon definition of television and
video preservation and a comprehensive archival view. Thus,
the overall purpose of the study is to lay down a factual
foundation for understanding the issues and problems facing
the preservation of American television and video materials,
and, based upon this information, to develop a national plan.

Just as the Library of Congress spearheaded the initiative to
assess the general state of American film preservation in
1993, it seems even more appropriate that the Library assume a
similar leadership role in this endeavor. The Copyright Act of
1976 gave the Library the awesome responsibility for
establishing the American Television and Radio Archives which
would house a permanent record of the television and radio
programs which are the heritage of the people of the United
States and to provide access to historians and scholars
without encouraging or causing copyright infringement.(2A)
Twenty years have elapsed since the passage of this historic
legislation, and remarkable changes have taken place since
then that make some general re-assessment necessary. Among
these changes are a university curriculum increasingly focused
on the inter-relationship of media and society; broadcast
industry expansion; and technological innovation. The
audiovisual archival community itself has changed
significantly in the last twenty years, in its numbers and its
degree of professionalism, increasingly willing to articulate
its genuine needs in competition with other national funding
priorities. Such changes inevitably influence the shape and
character of archival programs.

B. Scope of Study

This report concentrates on the preservation status of
television and video created over the preceding fifty years
of American history. Radio broadcast materials, important in
their own right, are not included in the present discussion
but may be the focus of another archival report. American
television includes all programs regardless of their delivery
or distribution systems; entertainment, documentary, news and
public affairs, commercial programs, public broadcasting
programs. For news and documentary, the scope includes
unedited footage, or outtakes and trims, what some have called
the raw materials of history. The scope also includes national
as well as local programming. Local television news is
represented in numerous collections throughout the nation.
Video materials made only for video display and not
necessarily for broadcast are also an important part of the
audiovisual heritage; these include video art, works conceived
in the context of video display and fixed on videotape;
independent or community video, productions made outside the
mainstream media and used in the struggle for social and
political change; and video as documentation, such as used by
Federal agencies to record important events in our collective
history as a nation. All this discussion of video and
videotape makes it easy to overlook the importance of film as
part of the American television heritage. From television
broadcasting's earliest days to the current era, motion
picture film has played a fundamental role. Thus films made
primarily for broadcast are included in the scope of this
report.

C. Fact-finding Process

Information and comments were invited relating to television
and video preservation nationwide. A notice was published in
the Federal Register on January 3, 1996 (See Appendix A).
Copies of the notices, along with a survey questionnaire, were
mailed to over 700 institutions and individuals inviting their
contribution or participation. In addition, a number of site
visits, interviews, and presentations were made to obtain
relevant information and stimulate interest in this research
project.

The core of the information presented in this report is based
on the statements and discussions made in three day-long
public hearings conducted by the Library of Congress in 1996:
Los Angeles, March 13; New York, March 19; and Washington,
March 26. Altogether 73 "witnesses" (not actually deposed and
sworn in) addressed many of the key issues and concerns,
described their own experiences in the field, and made
numerous thoughtful recommendations for improvement in basic
areas like preservation, access, training, public awareness,
and funding. (See Appendix E.) To the extent possible these
recommendations take into account the needs of public and
corporate archives and have been adopted and consolidated in
the "national plan," which forms the final part of this
report. (See Chapter 8.)

In each city a panel of Library officials and distinguished
representatives from different fields heard the statements and
led the discussions. Presentations were organized according to
affinity groups such as educators, major studios, network
television, public broadcasting, and public archives. Every
person who requested to make a statement before a panel was
accommodated. Due to time constraints, however, witnesses
could not always present their entire written statements.
However, both the oral and written statements have been
published elsewhere in this report. (See volumes 2,3,4 and 5.)

D. Urgency

In an ideal world television and video materials are recorded
on a durable preservation format and carefully managed and
stored from the first day of production. They are fully
described in comprehensive catalogs and databases within reach
of the nearest Internet connection, reference copies of the
programs themselves are as ubiquitous as books, and
restrictions governing nonprofit, educational use are few.
Unfortunately the real state of television and video
preservation is just the opposite of this ideal picture.
Videotape is at best a medium-term storage format whose
usefulness is shortened by adverse storage conditions and
technological obsolescence. Cataloging is scarce, limited to a
few institutions or selective parts of collections, making it
difficult to know what existed, what still exists, and where
it may be found. Access to television and video materials for
educational purposes is severely limited for a variety of
reasons, the most important being copyright ownership .
Archival access means a researcher's ability to consult
records or documents together with the ability to reproduce
them. The copyright owner has exclusive rights of
reproduction, exhibit, or display except for specific
limitations on exclusive use that Congress created for
archives and libraries with respect to daily newscasts and for
instances of "fair use."

It is important to view these limitation in the context of the
history of television, much of which has already been lost.
Early commercial television, roughly dating from the late
1940's, was live television, although recordings were made on
film, called "kinescopes," and used sparingly for repeats,
time-delay broadcasts to the west coast, and syndication in
other markets. Ampex introduced professional recording
videotape in 1956, an expensive 2-inch open-reel format used
selectively, and often erased and reused.

As the first witness at the Los Angeles public hearing,
television star Edie Adams described her difficulties when she
tried to obtain kinescopes and videotapes of the television
shows of comedian Ernie Kovacs, her husband who had died
suddenly in 1962. After his death she embarked on a search and
found it difficult to confirm inventories and titles; she
learned that the programs he did for the DuMont network were
dumped in a bay. She deposited what she found in UCLA's Film
and Television Archive. In the history of television many
important transmissions were not recorded or copies have been
lost.

Losses from Early Television History

þ Opening of the World's Fair in New York,
showing President Roosevelt with David
Sarnoff, April 20, 1939; the first
commercial broadcast.*

þ President Truman's address, September 30,
1947; first televised address from the
White House.

þ Opening nights from the Metropolitan
Opera broadcast by ABC in 1948 and 1950.

þ All television coverage of the 1948
presidential election.

þ Jackie Gleason's Cavalcade of Stars,
1950-1952.

þ I Love Lucy pilot, 1951. [Found!]

þ The first episode of CBS Evening News
recorded on videotape, November 1956.

þ The first Super Bowl recorded on
videotape and subsequently erased,
January 15, 1967.

þ Milton Berle's Texaco Theater, many
episodes lost.(3)

þ Soupy Sales programs during the 1960's.

þ The first ten years of the Tonight Show
were erased or destroyed, including the
television singing debut of Barbra
Streisand.(4)

þ Network copies of You'll Never Get Rich
starring Phil Silvers, who fortunately
saved some episodes and donated them to
UCLA.

þ Patsy Cline performances during the
1950's on local Washington, D.C.
television.

þ Hullabaloo and Shindig, early rock and
roll shows.

þ The complete version of The Twelve Angry
Men.

þ Only 26 episodes of Big Town survive.
þ CBS broadcast of Cinderella, a musical
speciality written for television by
Rogers and Hammerstein starring Julie
Andrews, March 21, 1957. Only the sound

*This and many items listed below are from a flyer distributed
by the Museum of Television and Radio(formerly the Museum of
Broadcasting)

Few early soap operas survive. There were few television
newscasts saved prior to August 1968. Many local television
news film libraries, some representing four decades of
regional and local history, were destroyed by the truck load.
Through sales, some copies of American programs and more
footage ended up in foreign broadcasting organizations or
archives, but no systematic survey has been undertaken to
ascertain what may survive.

E. Earlier Efforts to Preserve Television

Needless to say, extensive and irretrievable losses have
occurred in the past. Some of the losses can be attributed to
the limitations of technology and short-sighted commercial
practices. Part of the blame can be placed on the lack of a
preservation sensibility for television, a need not clearly
articulated by public archives until the last few decades. The
Library of Congress accepted copies of television programs for
copyright purposes as early as 1949, but television
preservation was not identified as a separate program apart
from its other activities. In 1965 the Academy of Television
Arts and Sciences established a national television library at
UCLA, which has evolved into the second largest public
archives of its kind in the United States. In 1976 UCLA
changed its name to the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Also, in the same year the Peabody Award Archive of broadcasts
was established at the University of Georgia.(5)

From 1967 to 1971 the William Paley Foundation commissioned
Dr. William B. Bluem to study the possibility of creating a
master collection of broadcast programs. The Bluem report
found that "there is an urgent and vital need to create a
master plan and a centralized collecting institution to
prevent destruction and loss."(6) This and subsequent actions
carried out by the Paley Foundation led to the founding of the
Museum of Broadcasting in 1976 in New York.

The impetus for the preservation of network news started not
with the networks but with the Television News Archive of
Vanderbilt University founded during the tumultuous
presidential election campaign of 1968.

The American Film Institute, which in 1972 decided to include
television in its preservation interests, through the speeches
and writings of its first director, George Stevens, Jr.,
articulated a need to preserve television programming. The AFI
formed a coordinating committee and encouraged the Ford
Foundation to develop guidance on acquisition, selection and
preservation issues. Despite the work of three committees
working under Ford sponsorship no final report was ever
issued. Nevertheless, the AFI helped to establish regular
lines of communications among television archives, at first
through small informal groups, and then through the Television
Archives Advisory Committee (TAAC), which subsequently merged
with the Film Archives Advisory Committee (FAAC). The combined
FAAC/TAAC re-constituted itself as the Association of Moving
Image Archivists (AMIA) in 1990. Since then AMIA has served
as an important forum for the regular exchange of information
between public and corporate archives that share a mutual
interest in moving-image preservation and other related
subjects.

The Library of Congress activities in this area have stemmed
from its responsibilities under the copyright law and the
donations of various individuals and organizations. The
Copyright Act of 1976 significantly increased the number of
television registrations. In 1977 the Library hired the
eminent media historian Erik Barnouw as a consultant to
establish policies for ATRA; subsequently, he became Chief of
the Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division. A year later, the Library hosted a large meeting of
institutions involved in collecting and preserving television
materials.

Another important trend in public archives leading up to this
report was the increase in local television news archives,
prompted by the broadcast industry's switch during the 1970's
from film to videotape in news gathering. Many institutions
such as state historical societies and media centers began to
receive donations of news film libraries but without the
resources or experience necessary for managing large
television film collections. This generated demand for
information and technical training. The National Historical
Publications and Records Commission funded a request from the
AFI National Center for Film and Video Preservation to hold a
local television news archives conference in 1987 in Madison,
Wisconsin, the first opportunity for representatives of these
collections to coordinate their efforts and share their
experiences. The creation of these new television archives
dramatically increased the need for resources. NHPRC has been
the only federal agency to provide major assistance. It is
important to note that the introduction of so many new
archivists into television archives in the 1980's has changed
the character of the profession by linking the management of
news film to traditional archival theory.

F. Major Issues

The following chapters of this report center around the main
sources of broadcast production since World War II; for the
vast majority of programs, these include the television
networks, the major motion picture studios, public
broadcasting, and local television news. The most important
issues to emerge relate to educational access, divided
responsibilities between public and corporate archives, the
preservation of television film and videotape, local
television news, and independent video.

1. Archival holdings of television and video materials have
enormous educational and cultural value as recognized in the
American Television and Radio Archives Act and underscored by
the testimony of educators who participated in the public
hearings. Public archives are obliged to acquire more and
more television materials because of televisionþs pervasive
influence in contemporary American society and because of
educational interests that frequently focus on television's
interactive role in numerous social and political processes.
Yet full access, as defined by a researcher's ability to
survey, consult, copy, and use the audiovisual record, remains
largely unattainable. The reasons are varied and complex, but
most relate to the continuing underfunding of public archives,
the isolation of scholars from archival issues, and copyright
interests.

Educators who described a compelling need for access to the
American television and video heritage for research and
teaching also cited numerous obstacles that prevent real
access, including significant losses, restrictive network
policies, unavailability of original sources, expense of
purchasing copies and electronic equipment, and lack of
regional or local access. Educators believe that an
insufficient amount of programming is being recorded off-air
and saved by public archives. As a group, they would like to
see ATRA's authority increased to enable the Library of
Congress to record programs off-air completely at its
discretion. Others also believe that the "fair use"
provisions of the copyright law are too restrictive, and
should therefore be revised to allow more non-profit
educational usage. The Vanderbilt University Television News
Archive and the network news departments or archives appear
locked into an adversarial relationship that may be
unwarranted. Broadcast organizations like NBC News are not
registering their news programs for copyright, leaving a gap
in the public record for some of the most important and
influential news broadcasts.

2. The television and video heritage represents an important
part of the collective experience and memory of the American
people, yet much of the public record--as it were--is retained
in the custody of private corporations whose policies are
subject to the ebb and flow of the market place. For the last
few years the growth of broadcasting and media markets has
been the driving force behind preservation projects in
corporate archives. Unlike in past horror stories, virtually
no programs are now deliberately destroyed. Television titles
have also benefitted from film preservation projects at the
major studios. Given the huge quantity of film and videotape
in network archives and the growing demand for educational
access, a partnership with public archives seems requisite and
inevitable. Corporate and public archives share
responsibility for television and video preservation. Yet the
likelihood that corporate let alone public archives will
transfer news film to film for preservation is remote, to say
the least. The alternative to not copying the film at all is
certain destruction, although proper storage can delay the
outcome.

3. Television archives are typically a mixture of film and
videotape holdings. One of the virtues of the Library of
Congress' report on the status of American film preservation
was that its recommendations addressed not only theatrical
films but film documents in all forms, fiction and nonfiction.
But aside from the major studios and several public archives,
most public and corporate archives have not implemented the
report's recommendations. In some ways the future of
television film is even more doubtful than videotape's.

4. Considering the extensive amount of television film,
particularly news and documentary, including field footage, to
what extent can videotape offer a practical and cost-effective
substitute for film-to-film copies? Supervised film transfers
made on modern scanners yield excellent results. The main
disadvantages of film-to-videotape copying are a reduced life
expectancy of the new copy, compared to film, and the
inadequacy of such transfers to meet the future needs of
advanced television systems.

5. The accumulated practical experience of videotape
technicians as it relates to the longevity of videotape seems
fairly inconclusive. Many 30-year-old 2-inch tapes are still
playable, and thus, in theory, capable of being re-formatted.
The scientific literature, however, indicates an inherent
potential for deterioration, something already observed in
television or video collections or in the work that passes
through videotape laboratories. In view of the deleterious
effects of elevated temperature and humidity and pollutant
gasses, archives have expressed a renewed interest in
improving storage conditions and in the possibility of shared
or regional storage. There is insufficient experience with
the new digital formats. Many variables such as compression,
miniaturization, tape thinness, and almost microscopic
recording tracks suggest that digital formats may not be a
complete panacea. The use of disk-based technology, however
promising, is viewed by archives as only experimental. A
general consensus exists, however, that the preservation of
videotape is less a question of preserving an artifact and
more one of possessing the resources to transfer videotapes
due to format obsolescence. Equipment, requisite technical
skills, and copying capacity are therefore central to any
discussion of videotape preservation. Public archives cannot
be self-sufficient; they need the cooperation of equipment and
videotape manufacturers and of video laboratories.

The preservation of videotape itself may not be the real
archival issue compared to that of format obsolescence. In
this context video preservation is not an end product but a
process of archival management that requires re-formatting and
copies, and quality control. Based on this system, a tentative
definition of video preservation may be ventured.

Video preservation, regardless of image source, is
an archival system that ensures the survival in
perpetuity of the program content according to the
highest technical standards reasonably available.
There are three major facets of video preservation:
(1) safeguarding the recording under secure and
favorable storage conditions, (2) providing for its
proper restoration and periodic transfer to modern
formats before the original or next generation copy
is no longer technologically supportable, and (3)
continuing protective maintenance of at least a
master and a copy, physically separated in storage,
preferably in different geographic locations.

"Videotape possesses a special challenge to archivists, librarians,
historians, and preservationists. As an information storage medium,
videotape is not as stable as photographic paper film or paper. Properly
cared for, film and paper can last for centuries, whereas most videotapes
will only last a few decades." Dr. John Van Bogart

6. The creation of numerous local television news archives
during the 1980's, including the off-air recording of news,
assures that some programming will be saved despite enormous
losses brought about by the disposal of many news film
libraries and the recycling of videotapes. Less than 10% of
the local news film libraries still survive--in an uneven
patchwork across the United States that excludes many major
metropolitan areas.

7. Media artists and community activists were in the late
1960's and the 1970's among the first to use 1/2-inch EIAJ
tapes and other formats for experimental artistic expression
and for documentary production outside mainstream media. The
tapes are now held in a variety of places and circumstances--
in archives, in non-profit distribution services, and in
garages, closets, and attics. Their continued existence has
reached a critical stage due to format obsolescence and tape
deterioration. With the notable exception of highly
capitalized programs like the Andy Warhol Foundation, few
resources are being made available to restore and re-format
these tapes. Works by media artists and community activists
attract interest across the United States although many
videotapes have not been cataloged nor described in union
lists or on-line finding aids.

CHAPTER TWO:

THE MATERIALS AND THEIR PRESERVATION NEEDS

2. THE MATERIALS AND THEIR PRESERVATION NEEDS

A. FILMS MADE FOR TELEVISION AND KINESCOPE RECORDINGS

(1) Extent of use of film-based materials

Motion picture film plays a key supporting role in the
preservation of television materials. In the first place,
videotape as a technology was not available commercially until
the end of 1956, yet by 1950 107 television stations were
already broadcasting throughout the nation.(7) Broadcasters
used film in several critical areas. First, cameramen used
16mm footage to cover news events in the field, and
subsequently editors selected and cut the footage for use as
clips or inserts in newscasts. Something akin to this process
was also used for the production of documentaries. Major
documentary productions like CBS's Air Power and NBC's
Victory At Sea were produced on 35mm film. In addition,
broadcasters also purchased news film from newsreel companies
and news film services.

Second, broadcasters used motion picture film to make copies
of television programs. Called kinescopes, these recordings
were made from a bright television image on to 16mm film,
negative or positive, with composite or separate optical and
magnetic sound. The kinescope process, first made available in
1947-48, enabled a film camera to record a television image in
synchronization; the image, however, had a flat, low contrast
appearance which was never quite satisfactory when compared to
the television broadcast. Color kinescopes, available in the
1970's, were even less satisfactory for broadcasting. The
kinescopes surviving today are for the most part 16mm black
and white. Broadcasters took advantage of kinescopes for
repeat broadcasts, in particular, time-delay broadcasts to the
west coast. Television producers or sponsors took advantage of
them to syndicate programs in other broadcast markets.

Third, even to this day the major studio producers for prime-
time television entertainment programs like miniseries,
sitcoms, television feature films continue to shoot on 35mm
film or super 16mm film, edit on computer systems, and
transfer the final copy to videotape. In more and more cases
the film originals are not "conformed" but "edit decision
lists" are retained so that in theory at least the films can
be subsequently edited to match the final production; in
practice, the television producers rarely edit the original
film. A gradual shift to original videotape production for
prime-time programs is taking place.

Ampex's introduction of a practical videotape system in 1956
should not be taken too literally as a clear demarcation
between the era of film and that of videotape. Film as
kinescopes continued to play a vital role until the early
1970's when the cheaper, more convenient 3/4-inch video
cassette sparked the real beginning of the end of film in the
world of television. The Bluem report indicated that for the
period 1948-1951, NBC had accumulated 1,270 kinescopes and by
1970 there were almost 17,000. NBC later donated these
programs to the Library of Congress. 2-inch tape was used
relatively sparingly to record programs permanently and was
often then erased and recycled for broadcast.

Film continued to be used in news and documentary production.
The most popular format from about 1950 to the mid-sixties was
16mm black-and-white news films in an original negative
composite sound format. 16mm color reversal film was used in
news production well into the 1970's, primarily, Ektachrome in
combination with magnetic sound stripe or a separate full-coat
magnetic sound track.

Film as an original recording medium is still the format of
choice in many instances where it is necessary to reproduce
scenes with high contrast ratios and render greater detail
than is possible with video.(8) In sum, film continued to be
used as a regular part of television production side by side
with videotape, and thus much of the early period that
survives, above all in news, has been recorded on film.

(2) Preservation problems

The archival issues central to the preservation of American
motion picture film have been discussed in the Library of
Congress's earlier report, Film Preservation 1993: A Study of
the Current State of American Film Preservation, 4 vols.
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1993). This report
described three overriding preservation concerns:
nitrocellulose film, cellulose acetate film deterioration, and
the impermanence of color film. The first major preservation
concern can be dismissed, because, happily, nitrate film, a
chemically unstable and highly inflammable film stock last
manufactured by Eastman Kodak in 1951, had little or no impact
on television. Nevertheless, acetate deterioration and the
impermanence of color film are germane to any discussion about
the preservation of television film materials.

a. Acetate film deterioration

Extant television film consists primarily of safety-based
cellulose triacetate or earlier forms of cellulose acetate
with lower acetyl content that continued to be manufactured in
a 16mm format into the 1960's. Film workers often confused
hypo staining or the result of excessive sodium thiosulfate
with film deterioration. But film archives have been aware of
the potential deterioration of this class of acetate-based
film since 1987, and subsequent studies have clarified the
roles of temperature, moisture or humidity, air pollutants,
and various types of containers in causing or accelerating
acetate deterioration. In archival parlance, this
deterioration has become known as the "vinegar syndrome," due
to the emanation of acetic gases that produce the familiar
odor of household vinegar. Film with a history of poor
storage conditions is especially vulnerable to the onset of
vinegar syndrome.(9) As a support base material, polyester or
PET (which not incidentally is the substrate for videotape)
has proven to be more impervious to adverse ambient storage
conditions.

b. Color film

The Library of Congress report also discussed the instability
or dye-fading of color film emulsions.(10) This is pertinent
to television news film primarily from the late 1960's through
the 1970's, even later for documentary production, and to
prime-time programs made by the major studios. Whereas the
major studios used Eastman color negative, starting in 1966-
67, news broadcasters used Kodak's Ektachrome film, a color
reversal film even less stable than the Eastman color which
was the main target of Martin Scorsese's criticism toward the
end of the 1970's. In response to this very public criticism
from directors and archivists, Kodak in the early 1980's
introduced its line of "low fade" emulsions with improved
color-dye stability, but there is no evidence that
broadcasters took advantage of this more expensive stock.
Color film from the 1960's and 1970's that has not been placed
in cold storage is probably already faded beyond 30%. As the
least stable, yellow dye is first to fade beyond recovery.

(3) Cold Storage

What acetate film deterioration and color-dye fading have in
common is the need for cool and dry storage conditions that
decelerate the chemical changes that ultimately destroy the
film base and image. Accordingly, the Library of Congress in
a subsequent report recommended "the improvement of storage
conditions as the cornerstone of national film preservation
policy and an integral part of federal funding programs."(11)
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) maximum
extended-term storage standards for silver-gelatin black-and-
white and color film are: 70øF/20-30% RH; and 35øF/20-30% RH,
respectively.(12) Yet few of the public archives that
responded to the storage survey carried out in conjunction
with this report have long-term storage facilities that meet
this standard. For the most part, the networks have
inadequate cold storage facilities for their color film. The
major studios and several public archives have storage
facilities meeting or exceeding this standard, with some
exceptions.

Even if these goals are not met, research by the Image
Permanence Institute and Eastman Kodak demonstrates that
lowering temperature and relative humidity by as little as ten
degrees and 10% RH can increase film life expectancy and color
stability by many years.(13) Providing good storage
conditions, while not entirely a panacea, is the single most
important step an archives can undertake to protect its
holdings.

(4) Other Preservation Problems

There are other preservation problems associated with
television film archives that make the prospect of long-term
survival problematic at best.

Black-and-white and Ektachrome reversal emulsions, rarely
employed by the major studios, were widely used in television
news and documentary production, and they are less stable than
negative/positive emulsions. Moreover, due to the immediacy of
broadcast deadlines, the chemical processing of these films
was seldom carried out according to the manufacturer's
specifications; film was improperly washed leaving excess
amounts of residual hypo, which stains the film's surface and
increases the rate of color-dye fading.

Film sound poses a problem for television preservation because
of the widespread use of magnetic sound on film, which was
never copied to optical sound. Many television documentaries
shot and edited on film were directly transferred to videotape
for broadcast; the preprint exists as film negative or
original reversal accompanied by a separate magnetic sound
track, unfortunately often stored in the same can. A magnetic
stripe sound track on Ektachrome is essentially a thin
coating of ferrous oxide. Over the years the oxide peels or
separates from the film base. In separate tracks, striped or
full coat, the same process can be observed. Moreover, a
study by Manchester Polytechnic in the United Kingdom
indicates that as the film sound track ages, the oxide gases
act as a catalyst in the process of acetate deterioration.(14)
Copying separate magnetic sound tracks has understandably
become a priority at the major studios, but not at other
archives that cannot afford to make the transfers. The
existence of separate sound tracks poses an extra equipment
burden on the smaller archives, because working with them
requires the purchase of more expensive and technically
sophisticated double-system editing machines.

In addition to the above concerns, television news film
collections invariably consist of poorly arranged numerous
short rolls of 16mm film. For broadcasters, films in this
state of disrepair were too difficult to access and certainly
too difficult to integrate with ENG techniques and procedures.
This is one of the main reasons why broadcasters decided to
dump their news film files or donate them to a public
archives. To bring these rolls under archival control it is
necessary to devote thousands of work hours to such activities
as arrangement, inspection, splicing, repairing, and cleaning.
Few local television news archives are sufficiently staffed to
carry out this necessary but painstaking work.(15)

For these reasons, then, motion picture film represents an
integral part of the television and video heritage with its
own array of physical vulnerabilities and preservation
priorities. Whether in public or corporate archives, most
television collections consist of film and videotape which
have little in common physically and technically save for
their ability to record moving images and sound.

(B) VIDEOTAPE RECORDINGS

(1) General Introduction

Videotape, as Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said
at the first public hearing, has proved to be both a blessing
and a curse. Unfortunately there isn't enough space in this
report to describe all the ways videotape has benefited
American civilization in science, education, entertainment,
industry, government, and culture. Film served as video's
predecessor since the turn of the century, leaving a enormous
legacy of American life and culture despite extensive losses
in the wake of deterioration, disasters, neglect, and
indifference; regrettably, a continuing process to this day.
In comparison with video, though, the use of the film camera
or projector was always a special event. Film never achieved
the ubiquity of videotape, the ever-present ability to record
almost every facet our society in a fixed and tangible form,
cheaply and conveniently if one desired, or as extravagantly
as the latest technology allowed. The possibilities are
essentially without limit.

Whether by design or default, the collective memory of our
precious images has been entrusted to videotape for some forty
years, 1956-1996. But videotape was never engineered to be a
permanent record, and no professional society recognizes it as
a permanent recording medium. Next to nitrocellulose film,
videotape is probably the next best medium for a society which
did not wish to be reminded of its past. Prolonging the life
of videotape is a complex task dependent upon numerous
variables, some of which are beyond the archives's control.

Having completed several intermittent years of research and
development, Ampex in 1956 demonstrated its Mark series of
videotape recorders for CBS broadcast executives, and in less
than one year Ampex was overwhelmed with orders. The first
broadcast utilizing videotape occurred on November 30, 1956,
when CBS Television City in Los Angeles re-broadcast "Douglas
Edwards and the News" from New York.(16)

Well before the years of the silicon chip, the first recorders
were free-standing boxes about the size of a washer and
dryer. The player/recorders were designed to transport large
open reels of 2-inch-wide magnetic tape that weighed as much
as 25 pounds and operated at speeds of 15 inches per second.
Due to its expense and technical complexity, 2-inch recording
had little impact outside the broadcast industry. For the
first few years, players were not even compatible with one
another, further localizing use.

(2) Basic composition

Videotape is a layered product composed of a number of
different elements.(17) Although the first audio tapes were
acetate-based, the underlying support of videotapes consists
of a fairly durable polyester film (polyethylene teraphthalate
(PET)). A back coating added to professional tapes eases
transport through the tape drives and improves overall
reliability. The magnetic particles, iron oxide or chromium
dioxide, are contained in a polyurethane binder coated to the
film substrate. The binder is a complex compound including
many different elements such as lubricants, dispersing agents,
resin-type materials, plasticizers, anti-static agents,
protective additives, wetting agents, polymers, and
adhesives.(18) The exact formulations are closely guarded
secrets which vary from one manufacturer to another.
Moreover, since there are no industry standards for the
formulation of videotape the chemical composition of newly
manufactured tape is subject to change at any time.

With the introduction of digital videotape in 1987, the
industry has shifted to a metal particle tape because it can
retain far more data than oxide tape.(19) Barrium ferrite is
also available for some advanced applications.

(3) Deterioration and obsolescence

Many things can go wrong with videotape that will prevent
completely successful playback or, in the worst case, result
in catastrophic failure. Causes are often traced to careless
or indifferent handling or poorly maintained equipment, in
other words, problems that can be corrected through training
and implementing more appropriate procedures.

These problems, however, pale in comparison to the
overarching issues of inherent deterioration and technological
obsolescence of video formats and their related equipment.
These are fundamental concerns for archives that make the
preservation of videotape far into the next century a
difficult and perhaps unattainable goal; however, a carefully
managed plan with sufficient financial support can minimize
potential losses to the American television and video
heritage.

Although an electronic medium, videotape possesses a physical
dimension that makes it vulnerable to deterioration. Its
physical properties consist of organic materials that degrade
under the influences of heat, moisture, and pollutant gases.
In archives, control of storage conditions has, rightfully,
become a core strategy to prolong the life of videotape. As
an electronic medium, the manufacture of videotape follows the
dictates of the market place with its demands for cost-
effective, smaller, and higher performance formats,
improvements that may lack any relationship to longevity. As
video production formats, 2-inch quadraplex and 3/4-inch U-
matic were viable for about 15 years; now formats seem to
change every four or five years with a bewildering array of
incompatible options. Given the rate of technological
evolution since 1956, a clear consensus exists among
archivists and technical experts that the real problem of
video preservation is how to cope with technological
obsolescence. This phenomenon has reached acute proportions
in respect of the copying of 2-inch tapes and open-reel 1/2-
inch EIAJ tapes, for which it is already difficult to locate
and maintain appropriate equipment and technicians experienced
with these formats.

(4) Longevity of the magnetic signal

From an archival standpoint one of the comforting features of
videotape is its relatively stable magnetic signal. Most
problems attributed to videotape are physical rather than
electronic. Modern magnetic coatings, according to guidance
from the 3M Company, can retain the recorded information for
an indefinite period of time unless altered by erasure or re-
recording or removed by a magnetic field.(20) The coating's
coercivity or its power to resist demagnetization has steadily
increased with the introduction of new formats. Extreme heat,
however, basically from a fire, can demagnetize tape.(21)
Magnetic performance is not really an issue under most storage
conditions.

Factored over many years, however, the particles will begin
to demagnetize. Referring to metal particle videotape, one
Ampex vice president estimated it would take some 90 years
under normal storage conditions before losing sufficient
magnetization that would create noticeable degradation.(22)

Destruction from stray magnetic fields on the order of
magnitude needed to alter videotapes is unlikely to be found
in archives. The gauss output of most electric motors is too
small to pose a danger.(23) Nonetheless, as a precaution it is
advisable not to store tapes near motors.

Tape's ability to be erased and re-recorded is a genuine
concern. This can happen accidentally or deliberately by the
flip of a switch unless procedural safeguards are enforced.

(5) Chemical stability of videotape

As videotape ages, it begins to break down chemically until it
reaches a point where it is no longer capable of being tracked
for satisfactory playback and transfer to another format. How
and when this occurs depend on several factors, the most
important being time in storage and exposure to heat,
atmospheric moisture, and pollutant gases. The earliest
videotapes, lacking protective cassette housings, are the most
vulnerable to damage and deterioration.

The chemical breakdown of videotape binders due to hydrolysis
has been well documented.(24) The binder's hygroscopic
tendency to absorb atmospheric moisture releases acids and
alcohol, products or catalysts that hasten the tape's
destruction. Aged tapes are more hygroscopic than newer tapes.
Elevated humidity in combination with warm temperatures
accelerates the process while drier and cooler conditions slow
it down. Videotapes kept in hot and humid climates have little
chance of long-term survival unless placed in carefully
controlled storage conditions. Hydrolysis weakens the binder
causing oxide shedding, dropouts, and the eventual loss of the
tape through severe degradation.(25) Peeling oxide and the
evaporation and migration of lubricants in the form of white
crystal powder causes tracking problems and leads to magnetic
head clogging. The National Media Lab's work on
instrumentation data tape, 1978-1981, for EROS (Earth
Resources Observations Systems) is a good illustration of the
sticky tape syndrome. All tapes were capable of being
reproduced after very slow baking at 130 degrees F, however.

When the tape was run on a tape transport or
winder/cleaner, the heat of friction melted the tape
coating components. Adhesive in nature, these
components collected on the stationary elements in
the tape path, such as magnetic tape drive heads,
tape guides, and wiping stations. When the tape
motion stopped the material cooled and "stuck" to
the stationary elements, stopping the ply of tape
and damaging the tape and the tape transport.(26)

High humidity--besides increasing the rate of moisture
absorption and binder deterioration--has other deleterious
consequences. It can cause further damage by increasing tape
pack stresses, distortion, tightness, and dropouts from debris
and exudations.(27) High humidity results in clogging, sticky
shed syndrome or "stiction," scoring, and head wear. One tape
can contaminate another if machines are not carefully cleaned
between plays. In combination with warm temperatures, high
humidity will encourage the growth of fungus which attacks the
organic compounds in the tape's binder.

Condensation on the tape edge causes "spot hydrolysis,"
gluing the edges together and causing the tape to tear if
played in this condition without treatment, especially in the
newer and thinner tapes.(28)

High temperatures can also cause damage such as increased tape
tightness, pressure, distortion, dropouts from wound in
debris, layer to layer adhesion, changes in dimensions, all of
which promote tracking errors. High temperatures will also
have a tendency to separate the substrate from the backing
since they shrink at different rates.(29)

(6) Air pollutants

Traces of acid produced by air pollution accelerate
hydrolysis. Sulphur dioxide, according to NIST, forms strong
acids in humid air.(30) Other common gases are nitrogen
dioxide, ozone, acetic acid, and formaldehyde. Videotape
restorers see the worst damage stemming from hostile storage
environments

(7) Common magnetic pigments and tape longevity

The most common magnetic pigments are iron oxide, metal
particle, and evaporated metal, each differing in stability;
chromium dioxide has been used less frequently. Iron oxide
and cobalt-modified iron oxide are the most stable, but metal
tapes have the ability to record a higher signal output, a
capability which makes them desirable for improved
professional performance and greater packing or concentration
of data. The single homogenous metal alloy evaporated on to
the substrate in 8mm formats consists of a very thin magnetic
coating that is not very durable.(31)

In 1991 Sony's best estimate of longevity for these materials
was about 15 years. 3M indicated that its research was
consistent with Sony's. Maxell declined to predict any life
expectancy for its tape products, and a TDK representative
indicated he knew of no published data on tape life expectancy
by his company, BASF, and that 15 years was a good guess.(32)
Evidently manufacturers have been reluctant to provide any
assurance for the extended life expectancy of their videotape
products. Since the first metal particle pigments were
unsatisfactory, several tape manufacturers collaborated in
laying to rest nagging concerns about the durability of D-2, a
metal particle tape that has become the principal recording
format for the broadcast industry since its introduction in
1988. Tests indicated a 14-year minimum durability of the
pigment before serious signal loss could occur under average
conditions; basically, a computer environment.(33) Sony
plotted much longer durability for the pigment; 24 years for
one type and 96 years for another.(34) It is important to
note that these tests relate to the pigment or coating
stability, and do not solve the problem of binder hydrolysis.
Any tape, regardless of coating, can potentially turn into a
sticky goo in extended storage at elevated temperatures and
humidities.(35) In recent years most manufacturers have
changed to more stable binders, but comparisons remain
difficult if not impossible. Tape manufacturers will not
divulge the composition of binders or pigments.(36)

(8) Other problems

Videotape is associated with a host of other problems that can
interfere with playback and result in the tape's utter
destruction.

a. Edge Damage

One of the most common problems is tape edge damage typically
caused by misaligned transports. Physical damage (stretching,
nicks, and dents, etc.) cause mistracking as the tape moves
through the guide paths.

b. Shedding

In addition to the shedding that results from chemical
breakdown, shedding can be caused by poorly maintained
equipment. Many tapes manufactured up to the early 1970's are
notorious for their shedding due to difficulties inherent in
the relatively weak bond between the binder and the substrate.
By 1970 3M, Ampex, and Memorex had developed more reliable
techniques for binding the magnetic layer to the polyester
base.(37) The shedding seen in later tapes is the result of
binder breakdown or poor operating conditions. Nonetheless,
the older tapes are larger and they shed more. A one-hour 2-
inch Quad tape has 108,000 square inches; a one hour 1/2 inch
VHS at standard speed has only 2,360 square inches.(38) The
older tapes were designed for more tape-to-head contact and
thus produced more friction.

c. Fungus

Contamination of videotape by fungus or mildew is fairly
common. Warm and humid conditions encourage fungus, which
attacks the organic materials in the binder. Tapes or
cassettes exposed to water or moisture from floods or
sprinklers are prone to fungus, especially if moisture becomes
trapped inside the cassette.

d. Dirt

Dirt and other debris can destroy a tape or impede its ability
to be tracked. Dirt from any source can become embedded in the
binder emulsion. Static electricity will attract dirt.
Evidently dirt is all pervasive, and like motion pictures,
restorers recommend cleaning all tapes before re-mastering if
they have a history of poor storage conditions or have
detectable signs of deterioration. Foreign broadcast archives
that have done a lot of 2-inch copying, routinely clean all 2-
inch tapes before copying rather than risk damage to expensive
and hard-to-replace magnetic heads.

e. Containers

Little research has been conducted on containers or cassettes
for videotape, but they are also a factor in longevity. Open-
reel recordings are far more vulnerable to damage than those
protected by cassettes. Some cassette housings are not dust
proof in the locked position. Many are made from relatively
inert polyethylene, but some are fabricated from recycled
plastics with high acid content which can distort at high
temperatures. Interior components can degrade, such as
springs and rubber materials from the moisture trapped inside.
Hinges can wear out. Standard VHS cassettes contain more than
30 parts in assembly. In a pilot study, NIST observed that
many cassettes showed mechanical problems after accelerated
aging or after five years of natural aging.(39) As for the
worst cases, sleeves and cassettes can be changed but not
without increasing the cost of preservation and
processing.(40) A damaged cassette, if not detected, can
result in irreparable tape damage.

(9) Storage

As John Van Bogart has pointed out, earlier storage guidelines
for videotape were a compromise to allow playback, and not
ideal for preservation.(41) Significant differences between
playback and storage areas require videotape to acclimate
before it can be played, but complete re-humidification or re-
moisturizing can take days or even weeks depending upon the
size of the tape, though such extreme measures are rarely
employed. Temperature equilibration can take place after
several hours. Failure to allow sufficient warm up time can
result in undetected condensation on the tape edge, while
failure to re-moisturize causes stress in the tape backcoat.
Recommendations for the long-term storage of videotape are
moving toward cooler and drier conditions, which although not
unreasonably low, are unavailable to many archives.

The storage issue represents something of a dichotomy between
broadcasters and archives. On one side, broadcasters who need
fairly quick access to the materials have said low-humidity
storage is a waste of money because the technology that
supports the videotape format will be obsolete in only a few
years, and that the money would be better spent on re-
formatting rather than constructing and maintaining expensive
storage conditions. On the other side, archivists have argued
that we have insufficient funding for re-formatting, we are
uncertain about the new formats, and our goal is to safeguard
and preserve the original videotape as long as possible
because it is all that exists. Unfortunately there are no easy
answers for the questions this issue raises. Few dispute the
likelihood that videotape will outlast the equipment intended
for playback. Archivists can only compromise based on an
understanding of the benefits of storage at specific stages,
measured against format obsolescence and projected resources
for re-formatting copies. Film archivists can consult the
Image Permanence Institute Storage Guide, but no comparable
guide is yet available for videotape.

Table 1: Videotape Storage Recommendations
Source Temperature (F) Relative Humidity(RH)

National Archives and
Records Administration (NARA) 65 30%

National Institute of Standards
and Technology Report
(for NARA) 30-40%

SMPTE RP103 (draft version) 63+/-4 30%+/-5

ANSI,IT/9, 1996 version 68 20-30%
59 20-40%
50 20-50%

Ampex(42) 68 30%

Peter Adelstein, IPI(43) 50 20-30%

(10) Shelving

Metal shelving, widely used for storing videotape, does not
appear to be a problem provided the shelves are properly
grounded. Certain paints and finishes may be a problem if they
continue to off gas after tapes have been shelved. Wood is not
acceptable for archival storage of videotape because of acid
vapors emitted from wood or wood finishes. In addition, wood
shelves are a factor in spreading flames in a fire emergency.

(11) Security and Fire Protection

Security is the first line of defense for the protection of
archival holdings--as a means to safeguard against theft and
other unauthorized access. Almost all the respondents to the
survey reported the availability of secure vaults or
buildings; some even had 24-hour guards.

Like most archival materials, videotapes are susceptible to
water damage from fire emergencies and sprinkler accidents.
Many fire protection systems, therefore, have dry-pipe
sprinklers with heat-activated sensors that provide good fire
protection but localize the effects of water spray. Some fire
protection systems employ Halon gas or other gaseous agents
which at least eliminate potential water damage from sprinkler
accidents.(44) Water damage frequently occurs from basement
floods and from storage areas located in a flood plain.
Additional security protection can be obtained by storing
multiple copies in different locations. However, only the
major studios and very few public archives have been able to
practice a policy of "strategic dispersal" on a geographic
scale.

(12) Copying, Transferring and Restoration

It bears repeating that imperfections develop in magnetic tape
primarily from inherent deficiencies such as poor layer
adhesion in the early formulations, from the ravages of poor
storage conditions, and from physical problems such as
creases, edge damage, poor winds, and embedded dirt. Dirt is
all pervasive, observed one video restorer. "There is
sufficient debris on every single tape we have examined to
interfere with some degree of signal retrieval."(45) To a
great extent and depending upon the degree of damage, a
certain amount of recovery is possible. To be sure, the
techniques used for recovery, some of which are proprietary,
are designed to allow successful playback in order to be able
to re-record the damaged original. They do not necessarily
extend the life of the original videotape. Some techniques
even accelerate its destruction.

It is important to distinguish between copying, transferring
and restoration. Copying is the straightforward dubbing or
duplication of a tape, as in making a reference copy for
routine use or to service another format. Transferring, re-
mastering, or re-formatting involves converting the original
to an updated format. Restoration implies a deliberate effort
to make a complete and error-free copy from the best available
original, minimizing all imperfections, while transferring the
tape to a new copy. Cleaning the tape beforehand is part of
restoration. In theory, digital technology allows some
improvement even beyond the original through error-correction
and signal enhancement. Generally restoration entails time-
consuming and painstaking steps, which drive up the cost of
preservation.

A system of triage is necessary in order to establish
priorities for copying, restoration, and maintenance. The
overall priorities in common use are (1) obsolete formats,
which will be discussed in more detail below; and (2) unique
or single copies. For other archives, priorities might be
determined from a physical examination of representative
tapes.

Physical inspection includes a more or less automated or
manual evaluation of the tape, examining for imperfections
visible to the laboratory technician such as exudations of
white crystal powder, shedding, stiction, scratches, or fungus
and deformities in the tape pack such as creases, cracking,
stretching, uneven wind, or edge damage. Some of the physical
defects such as edge damage, wrinkles, and creases can be
identified through the use of electronic cleaning/inspection
machines. These machines will also measure dropout according
to preset standards. In reality these machines are both
inspectors and cleaners, designed for use with pre-recorded
tape. They are designed to remove dirt, dust and loose
particles that cause dropouts. Most of the machinery is aimed
at the video cassette rental industry or at broadcasters who
recycle and re-record tapes. The value in an archival setting
is not apparent. Indeed the wrong application of an automatic
cleaning or burnishing device to remove loose oxide,
particularly to a creased tape, can have disastrous
consequences.(46)

Video restoration labs have developed sophisticated techniques
for removing or minimizing the effects of tape faults.
Archives have little objective guidance on the evaluation of
these techniques and equipment since they are proprietary.
In comparison to film archives where basic repairs and
cleaning can be done within the archives, public archives
depend on outside vendors if they have sufficient funding.

Before transferring, the cleaning of the tape's loose oxide
and other debris is necessary. Most of this is accomplished
with cleaning blades or burnishing points or dry paper wipes
or even washing with water. One innovative archives devised
its own 1/2-inch cleaner by attaching a microscreen shaver and
vacuum pump to clean the recording as it played for re-
recording.(47) Another technique used in the worst
circumstances is that of baking the tape at relatively low
baking temperatures for several hours or longer; the
temperature of the tape must be ramped up and down at a slow
rate. This serves the purpose of fixing the loose oxide so
that successful playback can be accomplished. None of these
techniques yields permanent results; tape deterioration will
still continue.

The use of Time Base Correctors (TBC) will tend to compensate
for many of the video signal problems in transferring or re-
formatting tapes. Unfortunately some of the earliest open-reel
tapes had nonstandard signals where TBC's will not provide
much assistance.(48) In such cases copying from the earliest
generation will be extremely important.

For the foreseeable future copying of videotape for re-
formatting or re-mastering will be done in "real time"--i.e.,
the recording time--plus the time for set up and quality
assurance. A ratio of 1.5 to 2.0 work hours to every 1.0 hour
of recorded time is not unreasonable. Two or three recording
stations could be operated simultaneously though it implies
some reduction in quality assurance. For 1-hour, 2-inch tapes,
2.0 to 3.0 hours are generally needed.(49) On such conversion
projects both digital and analog copies have been made. High
speed video duplicators--four brands available at last count--
were engineered for the video duplication industry and not the
studio or broadcast industry. The copies are accomplished by
means of "contact printing," in which the oxides are placed in
contact and a transfer takes place from a mirror master.(50)
Archives having thousands of hours of original video
recordings can only be discouraged by the overwhelming
prospect of re-formatting obsolete videotape formats.

Another dimension of restoration is aesthetic or ethical.
Digital technology allows such an extensive manipulation of
original images in terms of content, image and sound values,
colorization, and signal enhancement that the archivist's
ideal of preserving the aesthetic or documentary integrity of
originals can be lost if sufficient safeguards and standards
are not implemented. In addition, converting an analog tape
to digital can modify the original image in unexpected ways,
such as toning and softening details and the appearance of
image artifacts.

(13) Rewinding

The periodic rewinding of videotape as part of an archival
maintenance program (although accepted in principle) is
generally ignored in practice as too time consuming and labor
intensive. The reasons for rewinding are basically to relieve
stress in the tape pack in order to prevent deformities such
as layer-to-layer adhesion ("blocking"), and pack slippage
("wavy pack"), and print through. The backcoating helps to
minimize such deformities in storage. Cooler temperatures and
lower RH help to reduce the need for period rewinding. Thus
backcoated tapes in good storage conditions, according to Jim
Wheeler, should be rewound every ten years.(51)

(14) Major Formats for Archives

From 1956 to the present more than 100 fundamentally
incompatible video formats have been introduced into the
market place.(52) (See Appendix J) From an archival
viewpoint, it is fortunate that only about a dozen were or
continue to be viable commercially.

More than a dozen formats alone were introduced for the
industrial and educational markets such as CBS's short-lived
Electron Video Recording system which utilized a filmed-based
color video cartridge. Other failed formats include
Cartrivision or Cartridge Television, Selectavision, Kodak
Supermatic Video, and, though a well engineered product, the
infamous Betamax.(53) Except in very specialized
collections, these short-lived formats are not expected to
have much of an impact on archives.

The formats of greatest archival concern are those that were
the most popular from 1956 to 1996 in broadcasting,
industry/education, government, and the consumer markets.
These formats are listed below.

Table 3: Selected Analog Videotape Formats*

Format Coating Nominal Width Major Market

2-inch Iron oxide 1.4 mil 2-inch Broadcasters/Studios

1/2-inch
open reel Iron oxide 1/2-inch Independent Production

1-inch
Type A Iron oxide 1-inch Government/Studios

3/4-inch
U-matic Cobalt- 1.1 mil 3/4-inch ENG/Independent Production
modified
iron oxide

3/4-
Umatic
SP Cobalt- 1.5 mil 3/4-inch ENG/Independent Production
modified
iron oxide

Beta 1/2-inch Consumer

Betacam Cobalt- 0.8 mil 1/2-inch ENG/Independent
modified iron Production/Government
oxide, chromium
dioxide

Betacam SP Metal particle 0.55 mil 1/2-inch ENG/Independent
Production

M-II Metal particle 0.55 mil 1/2-inch ENG/Broadcasting

1-inch Cobalt- 1.1 mil 1-inch Broadcasting/Studios
Type C modified
oxide

8mm, Hi8 Metal 0.8 mil 8mm Consumers/ENG/Government/
particle, Independent Production
Evaporated
metal

VHS Cobalt- 0.8 mil 1/2-inch Consumers/Government
modified
oxide,
chromium
dioxide

S-VHS Cobalt- 0.8 mil 1/2-inch Independent Production/ENG
modified
oxide

*In addition to the NTSC versions, there are also PAL and
Secam versions, though these are less likely to be found in
American public archives.

Granted this listing may be considered arbitrary, but these
formats represent the most commonly used gauges and probably
represent more than 95% of the analog videotapes recorded in
the last 40 years that need to be preserved. Each was
manufactured for a particular segment of the market place. It
wasn't the format itself that limited its use but the cost,
complexity, and size of its ancillary equipment.

Since two-inch tape was designed for broadcasters, there was
little use of 2-inch tape outside the broadcast industry.
Even the Department of the Defense and the U.S. Information
Agency employed it on a relatively limited basis for original
video productions. Moreover, 2-inch was basically a studio
format rather than one that could be used conveniently for
shooting in the field. Cameras still had to be tethered to
relatively large recorders.

Sony's 1/2-inch EIAJ open-reel videotape introduced in 1969
was marketed as a consumer format. However, it quickly found a
niche in education and among community activist groups and
video artists. It was the first time that such groups had
cheap and convenient access to video recording technology.
Using port-a-packs, they pioneered the use of portable video
for news and documentary production and paved the way to ENG
(Electronic News Gathering).

The 3/4-inch, U-matic format, made available in the early
1970's, spread the video revolution even further by making
professional quality videotape recording economically
accessible to a wide spectrum of users, including broadcasters
who used it for ENG and for recording complete programs; it
was used by industry and government for a myriad of purposes;
and by documentary groups and video artists. Refinements in
tape composition, cameras, recorders, and editing equipment
helped to maintain the format's viability as a production
medium for almost 15 years. Although no longer used as a
production medium, there are hundreds of thousands of U-matic
cassettes stored in a variety of organizations throughout the
nation. The continued availability of players seems assured
for some years to come, though much of the ancillary
production equipment is no longer manufactured.

As the first high-quality videotape recorder, one-inch Type C
developed jointly by Ampex and Sony and marketed in 1978
became the mainstay of the studio recording industry,
replacing the two-inch format and several other short-lived
one-inch formats. This format was used as a studio format to
record complete programs for later broadcast or reuse.

Sony's Betacam, and its subsequent SP version, has grown in
popularity since the late 1980's. They essentially replaced
3/4-inch U-matic in ENG and documentary production because of
their comparatively superior resolution. However, the
relatively high cost of Betacam equipment discouraged use
outside the broadcast industry. CBS News and ABC News adopted
Betacam as a uniform format as did many local television
stations throughout the United States. NBC News adopted
Matsushita's M-II format, which was Betacam's main competitor,
but subsequently switched to Betacam SP. NBC has recently
adopted the use of Panasonic's D-3 format, also developed by
Matsushita.

The dominant consumer format since the late 1970's was 1/2-
inch VHS, and since 1990 it has had competition from 8mm or
Hi-8 formats composed of metal particle or evaporated metal
pigments. VHS and Hi-8 nonetheless gave individuals the
opportunity to record the world around them, including the
most important events in their lives such as weddings, family
vacations, and the occasional unanticipated news event. VHS
and Hi-8 have also been used for scientific and ethnographic
research. It is difficult to describe all the potential uses
just as it is difficult if not impossible to estimate their
number or how many consumer-produced videotapes might possess
sufficient value to warrant preservation in an archives.
Never intended as a production format, VHS is satisfactory for
viewing purposes but the image resolution significantly
degrades when copied to another generation. S-VHS format and
its equipment at three or four times the price provide
superior resolution thanks to its fine grain ferrous oxide
binder. It is worth noting that S-VHS and Hi-8 have
obliterated distinctions between consumer and professional
formats, chiefly because they deliver high resolution with
relatively moderate equipment costs. For example, military
camera operators routinely use S-VHS and Hi-8 in their
activities. CNN and CBS News employed the Hi-8 format in their
coverage of the Gulf War. Further, in 1992 the Fox
Broadcasting Company made a policy decision to use S-VHS for
its ENG operations, affecting some 150 stations.(54) For many
professional uses Hi-8 is typically "bumped" up to a standard
professional copy for editing and retention.(55) Television
news organizations that had previously used Hi-8 (e.g., Video
News International) are now beginning to switch to
professional/consumer digital formats.

Until now in this survey of common formats, 1956-96, the video
signal systems all have been analog. The television industry
is presently in the process of converting to digital recording
and production systems. Among the advantages of digital
recording are higher resolutions, error measurement and
correction, the ability to record--or clone, as it were--
copies without generational loss, and, for postproduction,
nonlinear editing. Two digital recording formats have been
available to the industry since the late 1980's, D-1 and D-2.
D-1, an iron oxide tape, has been primarily used for
postproduction; major studios retain long-form programs in D-
1, an expensive format beyond the means of public archives.
The D-2 format was an appropriate vehicle to ease the
transition from analog to digital, because it is compatible
with some analog systems and thus did not require a complete
and expensive studio equipment change. D-2 has been used
extensively to record and save completed programs by producers
and studios.(56) First generations of Sony's D-1 and D-2
equipment are already obsolete in production environments.
Matsushita's D-3, based on a 1/2-inch format, lends itself to
studio recording, because its resolution exceeds D-2's and is
portable for ENG.(57)

The last few years have seen the introduction of a plethora of
new video formats, including D-5, D-6, DCT, Digital Betacam,
DV, DVC, and Digital-S, and probably several more in the
offing.(58) One hopeful sign is the introduction of some
compatability between Panasonic and Sony "prosumer" formats,
DVPRO and DVCAM.(59)

Table 4: Digital Videotape Formats

Format Signal Coating Nominal Width Major Users

D-1 Component Iron oxide 0.5-0.6 3/4-inch Studios
(Sony)

D-2 Composite Metal Particle 0.5 3/4-inch Studios/
Broadcasting/
Government

D-3 Composite Metal Particle 0.4-0.55 1/2-inch Broadcasting/ENG

D-5 Component Metal Particle 0.43 1/2-inch Studios/Production

D-6* Component Metal Particle 0.54 1-inch HDTV

DCT Component Metal Particle 0.5 3/4-inch Studios
compressed

BetacamSX Component Metal Particle 0.57 1/2-inch Broadcasting
compressed

Digital Component Metal Particle 0.54 1/2-inch Broadcasting/ENG
Betacam compressed

Digital-S Component Metal Particle 0.57 1/2-inch ENG/
compressed Independent Prod.

DVCAM Component Metal Particle 0.33 1/4-inch Consumers/ENG/
compressed Independent Prod.

DVC/ Compressed Metal Particle 0.33 1/4-inch Consumers-DVC/
DVCPRO ENG/Ind. Prod.
(D-7*)

* Not yet SMPTE official designations

This overview of videotape formats suggests several trends
taking place. One is the move toward compactness and reduced
tape consumption in newer formats.(60) Another is the use of
thinner tapes. For example, D-2 videotape is about half the
thickness of 1-inch type C. Thinner tape is more vulnerable to
physical damage. There is also a trend toward more densely
packed recording tracks. Video compression is also a hallmark
of some of the newer formats, e.g. DCT, Digital Betacam, and
DVC. New formats are being introduced with more frequency and
presumably will have a shorter period of commercial viability.
Cheaper products as measured by performance and equipment
costs are driving out the more expensive ones following a
time-honored law of the market place. Since preservation is
not a market-driven issue, industry provides little guidance
to archives on the suitability of new formats; some are
definitely inappropriate for archiving.

The aging properties of magnetic tape is a field that requires
more research. There is no agreed upon system for evaluating
tape formats. Adhesion, friction, and hydrolysis have been
proposed as physical tests for standard evaluation and
accelerated age testing, but Japanese tape manufacturers would
not cooperate with industry efforts to create and implement
standardized tests. Three American companies who were
participating have all but ceased their activities in this
area. There are currently no standard methods for
determining life expectancies of videotape, making it
difficult if not impossible to compare data from different
manufacturers.(61)

(15) Obsolescence as the Key Technical Issue

To ensure retrieval of recorded information in the future, a
3M product memo advised users to pack a tape player, manuals,
and schematics along with the tape(62), a theme repeated by
several witnesses at the public hearings. Such advice may
have been given tongue in cheek, but begs the question of how
to cope with evolving technologies and the obsolescence of
others, surely a strategic question for industry and archives.
For industry it means a considerable investment in re-
equipping production and broadcast facilities and re-
formatting programs retained for re-broadcast or sale to other
markets. These changes closely parallel the choices faced by
public archives in their need to ensure that their videotapes
can be transferred to new video systems. Although archives are
not a leading force in the video market place, they are deeply
influenced by trends in format sales and video technology.
Archives have no control over the formats they accession or
inherit that become problems for the future. But they can
exercise some judgment about the formats they use for off-air
recording and for re-formatting projects.

The video manufacturers will not support a specific technology
beyond its commercial viability. U-matic, a format more than
25 years old, is something of an anomaly due to the sheer
number of recorded cassettes that remain in public and private
inventories. As the era of 2-inch and 1/2-inch EIAJ has been
over for some years, machine parts are no longer manufactured.
Transferring these formats has become an understandable
priority in archives because the technology is on the verge of
extinction. It is difficult to locate players in working
condition. Parts must be cannibalized. Transferring has become
increasingly a specialized skill.

In order to complete a large 2-inch transfer project, CBS
Television City found it necessary to induce some of its
retirees to return to work to help in re-formatting. CBS
achieved an excellent transfer rate with thousands of tapes
that had been stored in less than desirable conditions. They
had as many as ten 2-inch players in operation with six others
set aside for parts replacement, probably the largest
concentration of such equipment available in the United
States. Nonetheless, as the project manager observed, the
machines are dying, and in three to five years even CBS will
not have the capability to transfer large amounts of 2-inch
tape.(63)

Some of the short-lived formats from the 1970's and 1980's
have been hopelessly beyond recovery for years due to lack of
players in working condition. It is important to look at
these changes not in isolation but as part of an inevitable
trend that will characterize video evolution with more and
more frequency.

Re-formatting as a means of converting obsolete videotape
holdings poses two major dilemmas for the archival world: the
lack of an ideal video format and the growing volume of
material to be copied. Beyond the need to go to a digital
format to avoid generational loss, absent from the archival
field is anything remotely approaching what might be called
an ideal format or a "preservation copy." Until an ideal or
universal preservation format is introduced, video
preservation should be viewed not as a tangible product but a
continuing process aimed at protecting information that can
migrate from one technology to another as the need arises.
The current merger of video technology and computers suggests
that the ideal format in the future may not be videotape but
bitstreams of compressed data recorded on disks. It is
probable that video programs will have to be copied several
times over the next twenty or thirty years if current
technological trends continue.

Hovering over obsolescence as a preservation issue is the more
prosaic need of large archives to be able to copy tens of
thousands of hours of videotape before the supporting
technology disappears from the market place. The federal
repositories of the Library of Congress and the National
Archives and Records Administration have original analog video
holdings exceeding 200,000 hours, which will have to be copied
to another format early in the next century if the program
content is to survive. Other large collections like the
Vanderbilt University's Television News Archive and New York
Public Library's Dance Collection will face a similar dilemma.
Additionally, these are not static collections but growing
dramatically in direct proportion to the expansion of video
programming brought about by the increase of broadcasting
outlets and the other uses of videotape as a form of
documentation. If the volume of material continues to exceed
archival resources, re-formatting will no doubt become a
highly selective process which implicitly risks additional
losses to the American television and video heritage.

CHAPTER THREE:

TELEVISION AND VIDEO PRESERVATION

IN CORPORATE AND PUBLIC ARCHIVES

TELEVISION AND VIDEO PRESERVATION IN PRACTICE
IN CORPORATE AND PUBLIC ARCHIVES

Corporate:

A. Major Studios

Introduction

Hollywood major studios have produced the vast majority of
entertainment programs for the first 45 years of American
television history. Seven or eight studios by themselves or in
partnership with other companies have produced most prime-time
entertainment programs as well as daytime drama series known
as "soaps" or "soap operas." To cite a few familiar examples,
Sony/Columbia has produced Days of Our Lives, The Young and
the Restless, and Maude; Disney has produced numerous
television programs directed at children as well as sitcoms
such as Home Improvement and Golden Girls; Paramount has been
responsible for successful series like All in the Family, Star
Trek, and Entertainment Tonight. Through its acquisitions,
Turner controls Medical Center, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,
C.H.I.P.S., and Gilligan's Island; through subsidiaries, it
produces Seinfeld and original feature films for television.
While the general public identifies these programs with the
networks that broadcast them, the studios in fact produced
them, own the underlying rights, and ultimately are
responsible for their preservation.

Each of the eight major studios has an assets protection
program aimed at preserving extensive inventories of
television titles which, like theatrical films, are a
continuing source of potential income. Past programs remain
the life blood of these corporations. New productions alone
are insufficient for economic survival. The studios must be
able to recycle their products in syndication and in ever-
expanding markets represented by cable outlets, video
cassettes sales, and foreign sales. All genres--dramas,
sitcoms, thrillers, even old game shows--have sales potential
domestically and internationally. Past programs are protected
rather than destroyed since they represent the essential
underlying and future value of the corporations for
forecasting income and for insurance, taxes, and potential
sale to another studio or conglomerate. These activities are
the driving force behind their efforts to provide good storage
conditions, geographical separation of copies for security,
and preservation copying. William Humphrey, representing Sony
at the Los Angeles public hearings, outlined a position that
all the studios could accept--basically, that preservation
makes good economic sense.

With the emergence of pay cable, home video, and the demand of
programming for international territories, including our new
Sony Entertainment television network in Latin America and
India, the ability to service clients is dependent not only on
the quality of the product but also on the care and handling
of the assets used to create the product. Continued
accessibility and exploitation of the library helps us fuel
our preservation efforts.

The major studios have preservation/protection programs other
organizations might emulate if they had comparable resources
and could expect a significant financial return on their
investment. For many of the nation's television archives whose
value stems from their historical and cultural content, the
notion of financial returns is not only remote but tangential
to the educational value of their holdings.

Production practices

The use of motion picture film as original source material for
entertainment television production occurs frequently owing to
film's superior resolution and its ability to capture shades
and tones under a variety of lighting conditions. Today 35mm
film is primarily used in the production of long-form programs
like telefeatures and mini-series. Super 16mm is also employed
to save on equipment and film stock costs. Sony/Columbia, for
example, requires producers to deliver an original negative,
plus a D-1 videotape; for series, it requires an original
negative plus a tape with a 16:9 wide screen aspect ratio.
Shorter programs, including those produced on speculation, are
originated increasingly on videotape.

Regardless of image source, productions are pieced together or
created on nonlinear editing systems and then output back to
digital videotape. Nonlinear editing systems, such as Avid
Technology's, form the basis for electronic editing. Described
briefly, nonlinear editing occurs in post-production in which
digital videotape is downloaded in increments, commensurate
with hard-drive storage capacities; through the use of a
computer, images are rapidly and efficiently intermixed or
edited along with graphics, optical effects, and sound
elements in any order, limited only by one's creativity.
Electronic editing has made manual or traditional film
editing--with its cumbersome array of splicers, blades, film
cement, and bins--a dying art.

The use of videotape for originals and nonlinear editing come
to the industry at a time when tremendous pressure exists to
keep production costs low. Television advertisers, who
basically pay the networks for programs through the purchase
of air time for their ads, cannot be taken for granted; there
are more outlets than ever fiercely competing for their ad
accounts. The economics of television production will
therefore gradually minimize the use of motion picture film as
the original element in favor of videotape, a more cost-
effective production format.

This shift in technology will have profound implications for
preserving American entertainment programs originated on film,
because, after the video transfers have been made, technology
relegates the film original to secondary importance if it does
not make it entirely superfluous. The film original is not
always edited or conformed to the finished version, something
which only exists as a videotape; graphics and optical effects
exist only as a datafile output to videotape. In theory, a
film version can be reconstructed based upon data contained in
the Edit Decision Lists (EDL). But several studios have found
that it is too expensive to conform all film originals as a
general practice, especially if the videotape version
satisfies future broadcasting and syndication needs. Studios
nonetheless plan to store film originals indefinitely in
anticipation of a future need to conform them for re-broadcast
on advanced television systems. The lynchpin in this strategy
is the EDL, a proprietary software-dependent datafile whose
physical preservation and future readability cannot be
presumed. The studios now seems divided if not ambivalent on
the issue of conforming film originals made for television
programming.

Preservation policies

The preservation policies from one major studio to another
follow similar principles, operations, and standards. The
following describes the strategy in general; major digressions
or variations are noted.

a. No programs are destroyed as the result of a
deliberate decision. In the studios' view, all program formats
potentially represent some future revenue source. Accordingly,
programs are copied and protected by additional copies but not
necessarily to the same degree, as will be explained below.

b. Film-originated programs whose negatives are conformed
are protected at a minimum by master positives (b/w) or
interpositives (color). In comparison, color feature films
made for theaters are also protected by black-and-white silver
separations, three separate reels commonly termed YCM's--i.e,
for the yellow, cyan, and magenta tints in each separation. A
YCM separation costs about $25,000 for each feature film. The
television mini-series Roots, produced by Warner Brothers, is
probably the only television program protected by YCM's.
Studios as a general rule do not make YCM's for television
programs. In addition, Color Reversal Internegatives, formerly
regarded as protection copies for some television programs,
are being converted to interpositives due to doubts about the
long-term stability of CRI's. Matching sound track elements
are usually protected on multi-track magnetic tape.

c. Film-originated programs whose negatives are not
conformed exist as single film copies. The finished version
exists as a master videotape and multiple video copies. Along
with the EDL, the unconformed negatives are retained
indefinitely.

d. Videotape-originated programs are protected by
additional videotape copies.
MGM's standard policy is to make a D-1 copy and two digital
clones; the studio assumes ten years viability for the tapes
and plans to recopy them in seven years. D-1 appears to be the
format of choice for the most important productions. As for
obsolete 2-inch videotapes, the studios combined reported only
a relatively small number of uncopied items (approx. 900).
Since most 2-inch videotapes were copied some years ago, they
were transferred to 1-inch type C, a then state-of-the-art
analog videotape. More typical in the last few years as
protection copies are D-1, D-2, and Digital Betacam. Fox is
using DCT. Turner Entertainment's approach to re-mastering may
be the most representative: prior to 1988, 1-inch type C;
1988-1994, D-2; and in recent years D-1, which has been
reserved for long-form programs and Digital Betacam for the
rest. Turner plans to re-master all tapes older than seven
years.

e. Though an analog videotape, 1-inch type C is not
exactly viewed as an obsolete format for a priority conversion
program, but such tapes are monitored, evaluated, and copied
as necessary for programming reasons or for deficiencies in
the original transfers.(64)

f. No studio reported a policy of disposing of originals
after copying; they are held indefinitely.

g. Only one studio reported a policy of periodic
rewinding of master videotapes for preservation maintenance;
as for the rest, the sheer number of items remains too
daunting even to contemplate such a policy. Rather, emphasis
is placed on periodic re-mastering, good quality control of
copies, and appropriate storage conditions.

h. In addition to fairly extensive copying programs, the
studios have placed a great deal of emphasis on improved
storage conditions as a key part of their preservation
strategies and, in the last ten years, have invested
considerable funding in building new vaults, refurbishing
studio properties for storage, and using contract storage
facilities in other parts of the country. Both theatrical
films and television materials benefit from proper storage
conditions.

Table 5: Studios' Average Storage Conditions

Company Film Video
Temp F/RH% Temp F/RH%

Disney 55/50% 65/50%

Fox 34/25% 65/55%

MCA/Universal 48/45% 67/40%

Paramount 40/25% 70/50%

50/40% (mine)

Sony/Columbia 40/25-30% (originals) 68/40-50% (originals)
45/30%(intermediates) 60-70/40-60%
(intermediates)

Turner Entertainment 45/40% (originals) 65/50%
40/40% (interpositives)
68/50% (b/w)

Warner Brothers 35/30% 68/50%

I. Another aspect of storage is the geographical
dispersal of copies for reasons of security. Originals and
protection copies are stored in separate parts of the country.
The studios utilize their west coast and east coast
facilities, including contract storage in the Los Angeles area
like the advanced Pro-tek system operated by Eastman Kodak,
and commercial underground storage in Kansas and Pennsylvania.
A natural or other disaster in Los Angeles should not
catastrophically affect their ability to retrieve high quality
copies for continuing commercial use.

Table 6: Some Studio Statistics for Television Materials

Disney 6,500 television programs on 80,000 reels and tapes

Fox 54,000 television programs on 780,000 reels and tapes

MCA/Universal 18,000 (through 1994) television programs on 217,000 reels and tapes

Paramount (Viacom) 8,000 television programs on 1,200,000 reels and tapes

Sony/Columbia 35,000 television programs on 600,000 reels and tapes

Turner Entertainment 20,000 television programs on 337,000 reels and tapes

Warner Brothers 28,000 television programs on 1,000,000 reels and tapes

Deposit of copies in other archives is not an integral part of
their preservation strategy; rather their goal is to remain
self-sufficient in controlling quality copies and in their
ability to reproduce new ones despite changes in technology.
However, copies of programs registered for copyright are
deposited in the Library of Congress. Usually these copies
consist of 3/4-inch and, even, 1/2-inch video cassettes. Sony
deposited 1-inch type C for television features, Disney
deposited some air prints if available, and Fox deposited
Betacam SP, also if available as an extra.

Studios have retained most of their television script files,
some of which have been microfilmed; in the last few years
some exist only as computer diskettes, a precarious record
format. In addition, Turner Entertainment has created an
extensive photo database of production still picture images.
Only Disney, however, has a formal research archives, the Walt
Disney Archives, where research materials such as
publications, stills, annual reports, photographs, and
publicity materials, are available to outside researchers.

Supported by their own main-frame computers, the studios have
fairly comprehensive database inventories for film and
television materials. The title--individual, series, or
episode--is the primary point of access. Elaborate data
screens describe the myriad components that back up each
production. Shelving and movement to and from laboratories are
tracked through bar code interfaces. Unfortunately these
databases are not too helpful for facilitating subject-matter
research such as formal titles and variants, dates, production
credits, synopses, etc. The sales and marketing staff have
access to this data through lists, old catalogs, and a variety
of other finding aids.

Cooperation with Public Archives

The major studios have good records of cooperation with public
archives, and, despite periodic changes in ownership and
management, there is no reason to doubt that this basic
relationship will change. They are usually obliging when
archives request copies of particular television programs or
permission to exhibit. Studios have noted, however, that
public archives have not actively sought many television
materials from them or financial assistance for preservation
projects, with the exception of the Library of Congress and
the Museum of Television and Radio. Sony/Columbia's financial
support of the University of Wisconsin's project to convert 2-
inch tapes in the David Susskind Collection is a good example
of cooperation. Studios recognize and appreciate the research
interest in their programs and are content to have those
interests served through a public archives rather than through
the studios. In fact, research requests received from
individuals are initially referred to the legal departments
and responses, if any, are ad hoc.

Concerns have been expressed over the extra costs that may be
incurred in making a copy for a public archives if one is not
readily available. Copyright is another concern, but not in
the sense of copyright abuse or infringement, for the public
archives have a good record of enforcement and studios trust
public archives to respect their ownership of underlying
rights. It follows that transactions based on poor judgment or
bad faith will reduce the cooperation public archives receive.
Nonetheless, studios are concerned about loss of control of
high-quality copies even in public archives for fear that they
will be used as masters for broadcast or commercial
distribution. Asking for a 1/2-inch videotape or 3/4-inch copy
is one thing, while D-1 or D-2 is something else indeed. In
the long run, studios will be concerned about quality copies
in public archives when the oldest syndicated television
programs start to lapse into the public domain several decades
from now. On the other hand, a high-quality copy in a public
archives offers the studios an additional dimension of
protection of their assets. However, the loss of control of
broadcast-quality or master material raises questions and is
perceived as threatening to the studios as copyright owners.

General Assessment

The preservation of entertainment television programs produced
by the major studios has benefitted from its association with
the theatrical film industry. Intermixed with theatrical
films, they receive the same benefits of comprehensive
inventory control, appropriate storage conditions, and
strategic dispersal of copies in different geographic
locations. In addition, they are a highly visible part of the
assets protection programs which aim at securing high-quality
protection copies and at updating or re-mastering videotape
formats before they become obsolete or difficult to restore.
Few organizations outside the major studios could afford to
preserve programs in the D-1 format.

The nation's archives and television organizations would do
well to be able to emulate the studios' preservation
strategies if they were in a financial position to do so. But
the studios have a unique economic paradigm that is irrelevant
to the nation's public archives and only applicable in part to
other television organizations like the networks and public
broadcasting. Preservation programs managed by the studios,
though relatively recent in origin, are not likely to change
because of new owners or management. Absorption of the
nation's media organizations into large conglomerates should
not adversely affect on-going preservation operations.

The growing trend to retain but leave film originals
unconformed to the finished videotape version should be viewed
with some concern, because it represents a missed opportunity
to conserve a longer lasting, universal copy. The commercial
introduction of advanced television now in the offing may
place renewed value on film originals.

Studios lack a comprehensive descriptive database of their
productions, including traditional cataloging information
based upon established national and international standards
for the description of moving images, though the advantages of
such a catalog should be manifest. Availability of catalogs
can only stimulate more research interest in past television
programming. At the same time, comprehensive catalogs would
enable sales and marketing staffs--not to mention new owners--
to achieve a better understanding and familiarity of their
corporate assets for commercial exploitation. It is likely
that a public archives would be interested in preparing such a
descriptive database under the terms of a grant from a studio.
If each studio prepared or sponsored a database and subsequent
published catalog, together they would constitute an
impressive historical record of American television
production, comparable in research value to the American Film
Institute's multi-volume catalog of American cinema. In the
archival field, there is probably no better example of how
corporate interests could yield a significant public benefit.

Studio preservation personnel interact with the archival
community, for example, through the Association of Moving
Image Archivists, which provides a useful means for the
exchange of information on preservation issues. In aggregate,
studios have a great deal of experience and expertise that can
be immensely helpful to the public archives if studio staff
are allowed to share their knowledge in a professional forum.
Important precedents have been established between the studios
and the nitrate film archives, and this spirit of cooperation
should continue with respect to the preservation of television
materials.

Public archives have an opportunity to formulate their
policies based upon the assumption that the major studios will
be primarily responsible for the preservation of their own
productions. It would be extremely wasteful for public
archives to attempt to replicate the work carried out by
studios. As long as the studios are providing protection
copies, proper storage, and re-mastering of obsolete
videotape formats, public archives can treat their television
films or videotapes as primarily study copies that can be
replaced if damaged or destroyed. Archives can re-direct their
preservation efforts to other priorities. By the same token,
studios should accommodate public archives when they request
study copies for their collections since this helps to
facilitate public access for the outside researchers who can
only receive limited studio assistance.

B. TELEVISION NETWORKS

Introduction

The major television networks ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, joined by
CNN in the areas of news and public affairs, have been
responsible for producing most of American television
programming over the years in entertainment, sports, and news
and public affairs. In addition to their own productions, the
news divisions possess extensive audiovisual documentation of
historic public events like Congressional committee hearings
that were not recorded elsewhere. CBS News, for example, was
the only network to retain a fairly complete kinescope record
of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, a seminal event in
American history during the television era.

Vying for audience ratings and the same commercial sponsors,
the networks are competitors in every sense of the word. They
have similar responsibilities and interests, they operate
parallel organizations with comparable administrative
divisions. What has worked well as programming by one
network has been frequently imitated by the others.

Their news divisions face precisely the same problems,
challenges, and priorities every day. Their archives and
libraries exist to support the production needs of the
corporation. Though the network management recognizes the
value of their work as a record of American history, it is
only a secondary consideration, a byproduct of their
obligation to broadcast the news. Perry Wolf, a CBS News
documentary producer, once said: "The name of the organization
is CBS News. It's not the CBS Public Library,"(65) aptly
alluding to the role of archives within the network news
divisions. The news archives and libraries operate 24 hours a
day; their holdings are in great demand, with thousands of
tapes in circulation within the company at any given time.
Videotape's compactness, moderate cost, and convenience have
produced an avalanche of cassettes which challenges the
networks' best management skills.

They all share similar percentages of television film and
major video formats, and thus face the same problems of film
and tape deterioration and format obsolescence. NBC News,
however, is unique in its adoption of the M-II format.(66)
The increased emphasis on video preservation is a fairly
recent phenomenon for all the networks, prompted by the
recognition of the asset value of their holdings and by the
declining availability of 2-inch players and necessary
operational expertise. Finally, NBC has started a 24-hour
news channel, and ABC has a plan in abeyance for now; should
these ventures prove successful, CBS no doubt will follow suit
at some point. Such an ambitious production schedule will
place extraordinary demands on the corporate archives while at
the same time underscoring their continuing value.

Management of entertainment programs seems much less
concentrated. In the first place, unlike the news programs
many prime time programs are not owned by the networks.
Responsibility and ownership rest with the major studios or
independent producers. (See the earlier section on the major
studios.) In principle, the networks return the physical
copies of these programs to the owners after their broadcast
license has expired. In practice, copies of many entertainment
productions remain in limbo in a network storage facility long
after license expiration. These copies tend to be film prints
or tapes for broadcast. In past years, networks produced far
more of their own entertainment programs than they do today.
CBS produced the popular Gunsmoke series for twenty years,
1955-1975, as well as numerous plays, telefeatures, and
variety shows. In such cases ownership and copyright generally
have remained with the networks.

All the networks and CNN are owned by larger media
conglomerates. The changes in ownership are relatively new
and it remains to be seen what impact the new owners will have
on the archival programs in each company. Disney's impact on
its Capital Cities/ABC subsidiary may benefit preservation in
view of Disney's excellent experience in preserving motion
picture film. Occasional changes in ownership prompt
managerial discussions about the fundamental value and place
of archives in a commercial enterprise. Are the archives a
liability or an asset? Do the large news film holdings still
have value in an electronic environment? What is the purpose
of keeping obsolete videotapes that will never be broadcast
again? Does any of the unedited footage represent potential
legal liabilities? While questions such as these have not
resulted in the wholesale destruction of network films and
videotapes, they have had devastating consequences at the
affiliate level, where many local station managers and owners
across the United States have allowed the destruction of the
American television heritage to take place.

The networks and CNN have shown several signs of cooperating
with public repositories to permit the educational use of
their programs. The networks have a strong record of
cooperation with the Library of Congress, the National
Archives (including its Presidential Libraries), UCLA, and the
Museum of Television and Radio, founded by William Paley,
former owner of CBS, and there is little reason to doubt that
such cooperation cannot continue, based on the relationship of
trust and goodwill that has already been established.

ABC

ABC is working toward a unified film and videotape archive for
news, sports, and entertainment. The company's massive
holdings of film and videotape include more than one million
items, 80% of which consist of news field cassettes. These
materials, according to Michael Lang, "were balkanized into
different collections, located in different places, operated
by different divisions or departments, catalogued in different
ways and to different standards, and stored with different
levels of care."

Table 7: ABC Film and Videotape Inventory

Entertainment 64,000 films/tapes

News 850,000 """ (includes 100,000,000 feet of film)

60,000 """ (off-air records)

Sports 63,000 tapes, including 10,000 uncopied 2" tapes

N.B. In addition, ABC News holds some 15,000 cartons of film
and tape representing outtakes and trims and other production
materials from television magazine series and documentaries
produced by ABC News. These materials are generally controlled
by the production units and are not intermixed with the
general news holdings because of restrictions, including
broadcast rights limitations.

ABC News has had a film or videotape library since 1963
although the physical custody was delegated to Sherman
Grinberg Film Libraries, Inc., which handled all outside stock
footage sales in a contractual relationship that lasted about
thirty years. ABC News has now taken back custody of all its
film and tapes and operates its own research and sales
department. Like NBC and CBS, ABC uses a great deal of file
film in many of its productions. The file copies are so
interwoven with daily research and production activities that
as many as 90,000 "archived" cassettes from the library can be
in circulation at any one time even before any preservation or
security copies are made, and ensuring their return is
sometimes very difficult amidst the exigencies of the the
broadcast world.

The field cassettes undergo an initial screening process to
determine which ones should be recycled or retained. As they
prepare descriptions, staff catalogers attempt to identify
potentially useful footage and its significance. Most of the
time this work is prepared on the basis of reviewing a written
description, not by actually reviewing the cassette. At the
present time ABC News library staff reviews about 4,000
cassettes each month. In an election year like 1996, the rate
could exceed 5,000 monthly. Descriptions are entered into
ABC's Stairs database system available to the company through
a wide area network. ABC News made this database available on
a CD-ROM in 1989, and in 1996 made it available on Internet,
located at the FootageNet website.

Although the materials have a history of poor storage
conditions, in its new facility there are separate vaults for
news film and videotape; film is stored at 62 degrees (F) with
50% RH; tape, 67 degrees (F), also 50% RH. ABC's worldwide
bureaus, in such far away places as Beijing, Moscow, Tel Aviv,
and Tokyo, eventually send all their tapes to the New York
headquarters for centralized storage and administration. ABC
entertainment materials are housed in the Los Angeles area,
broken down into three large administrative categories:
Distribution, Production, and ABC Circle Films. Aside from
vault security and fire protection, no special storage
conditions were evident.

ABC's Media Conservation Facility is the most prominent
feature of the network's unified archive program. Basically,
the MCF consists of screening areas and dubbing facilities for
the most endangered videotapes. It will be stocked with video
equipment capable of playing back all formats that ABC has
worked with over the years ( 2-inch Quad, 1-inch Type B and
C, 3/4-inch U-Matic, Betacam/SP, D-2 (Digital)). If the
current plan is carried out, the MCF will have as many as 41
players. The ability to perform physical restoration on
videotapes that have started to deteriorate will also be
incorporated into the MCF's basic design.

ABC's plan of work emphasizes the most endangered tapes due to
format obsolescence (e.g., 2-inch Quad) and tape
deterioration. Tapes from any of its divisions can be sent to
the MCF. Another goal is to reduce the gargantuan copying
workload which the field cassettes represent. Each cassette
contains 20-30 minutes of running time, or in their entirety
several hundred thousand hours of running time for all the
field cassettes.(67) Through a series of editorial decisions,
ABC will eliminate some extraneous footage in transferring
originals to the new formats:
--Empty podium shots. Often cameras are set up and tested
before the speaker's entrance.
--"Standuppers." These consist of shots or retakes of on-
camera reporters who rehearse their presentations but
don't get it right the first time.
--Graphic builds. These consist of title information and
other graphic content.
--Multiple camera set ups. Footage of the same subject
from different cameras.

These editorial criteria will be applied during a screening
review process during which the tapes will be scanned at
normal and faster than normal speeds. The edit information
file will be placed in a database for use during the dubbing.
ABC believes in principle that original tapes can be disposed
of after copying, but plans to retain them as long as the
availability of shelf space is not a problem.

The new copies will be made on two 60-minute video cassettes:
one Betacam-SP (analog) and the other D-2. The former will
constitute the working copy while the D-2 will be stored off
site. For ABC D-2 is only an initial choice as the "long-term
archival storage copy." D-2 was chosen because it is digital
and, in ABC's opinion, not ridiculously expensive. Also, D-2
can render additional copies without generational loss.
Endangered tapes from any part of ABC are eligible for
conversion.

As for television film materials, other than air conditioned
storage in New York and Los Angeles, there is no special
preservation or assets protection program at the present time.
ABC deposited its collection of early kinescopes with UCLA's
Film and Television Archive; as the donor, ABC has retained
its rights to the intellectual property.

CBS

CBS has the largest holdings of television film and videotape,
well over one million items. Administratively, they fall
under three separate major divisions: Entertainment, News, and
Sports. The entertainment materials have been recently
consolidated in Los Angeles and news film and tapes in New
York.

Table 8: CBS Film and Videotape Inventory

Entertainment 45,000 videotapes
100,000 reels of film

News 1,000,000 videotapes
150,000,000 feet of film

Sports 10,000 2-inch tapes (Balance:NA)

N.B. In addition, the News Division holds some 80,000 cartons
of mixed film and tape which represent the outtakes and trims
from documentary productions and television news magazines.

Like ABC, CBS has only recently initiated its archival
program for entertainment materials.
It was prompted by the closing of its contract storage
facility in Fort Lee, New Jersey. CBS managers decided to
consolidate all of their entertainment materials on the west
coast under the supervision of the videotape operations staff
located in CBS Television City. Copies are geographically
dispersed, with prints separated from preprint and tapes
separated from film. Some films are kept in cold storage with
low relative humidity at a vendor facility. Videotape is
stored at 66øF and 50% RH. Films, however, have a mixed
storage history, most very poor. CBS plans to employ molecular
sieves(68) in combination with good storage conditions to
retard deterioration in films showing signs of vinegar
syndrome. Many older programs have been copied in recent years
due to home video sales through Columbia House, a CBS
subsidiary.

CBS is in an advantageous position since it possesses the
largest 2-inch copying facility in the country. It has ten
working 2-inch players with six additional machines that may
be used for spare parts to keep the other ten running. CBS
Entertainment has about 20,000 uncopied 2-inch tapes. The
Sports Division has about 10,000. In addition, CBS will
perform transfer work for outside organizations. A recent
large customer, Martin-Goodson Productions, ordered the
transfer of about 32,000 kinescopes and 2-inch tapes to
Digital Betacam. "Eventually," as CBSþ Dan Sullivan reported,
"it will not be financially possible for CBS to keep these
machines running and when that point is reached large scale
transfer projects will no longer be possible simply because
there will be no machines to do them on."

CBS is the only network that still retains its kinescopes,
which are divided between the News and Entertainment
Divisions. ABC and NBC have donated their kinescopes to UCLA's
Film and Television Archive and to the Library of Congress,
respectively.

CBS News has had a combined audiovisual archives department
since 1969 when it was established under the management of
Sam Suratt, who, with a doctorate in American history, was not
unsympathetic to the interests of scholars in obtaining
research access to past news programs. CBS News' current
preservation strategy, as set out by Suratt, now retired,
consists of (1) consolidated storage in a newly refurbished
facility at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, (2)
employment of professional archivists , and (3) since 1975 the
placement of security copies of CBS daily news and special
events broadcasts at the Library of Congress and the National
Archives and Records Administration. These 3/4-inch video
cassettes were also originally intended to serve as access
copies for educational use throughout the United States
through inter-library loans.

The deposit agreement with NARA (then, NARS) occurred around
the same time CBS was conducting a legal suit against
Vanderbilt University's Television News Archive for the off-
air taping and distributing of CBS evening newscasts without a
license or permission. Faced with a barrage of criticism,
some from politically conservative groups, that the networks
were exercising a kind of tyrannical control over news
broadcasts that were not subject to review and analysis, CBS
News decided to make copies of its future newscasts available
for public scrutiny. The availability of U-matic cassettes
made this economically possible. CBS's adamant refusal to
allow excerpting and its restriction on use to library or
archives premises irritated some scholars, who found
Vanderbilt's liberal access policy much more convenient. In
any event, the issue was settled in Congress instead of a
court room with passage of the Copyright Act of 1976, which
clearly affirmed the right of archives and libraries to make
and retain videotape recordings of daily news broadcasts.
These events have colored CBS's relationship with public
archives ever since. In principle, CBS still remains opposed
to off-air taping and excerpting and complains each time its
footage appears on air without authorization.(69)

CBS News' more immediate preservation priorities are focused
on 2-inch and 3/4-inch formats, which they plan to copy to D-2
and Betacam SP. There are approximately 20,000 2-inch tapes
half of which have yet to be remastered or copied. The plan
calls for copying them at the Broadcast Center; however, CBS
News has a limited number of machines and a dwindling supply
of experienced technicians. The staff at CBS News sees 3/4-
inch U-matic as the next problem because of tape deterioration
and the sheer volume of cassettes.

They have not begun to screen field cassettes to reduce
volume, nor have they donated their kinescopes to any
repository. The archives holds everything CBS has ever done,
aired and unaired, including audio, film, tapes, scripts, etc.
Only last year a CBS manager was pessimistic about their
ability to copy the 2-inch tapes and expressed the feeling
that if they are not already copied they may be beyond
recovery.(70) The successful completion of the Martin-Goodson
game show project, however, has suggested a larger window of
opportunity for copying 2-inch, and some CBS News may be
shipped to Los Angeles for copying.

NBC

On the occasion of its 60th anniversary in 1986, NBC donated
to the Library of Congress some 20,000 kinescopes of primarily
entertainment programs, 1948-1977, nearly half which were
from the era of "live TV", 1948-1960. This transaction
represents the largest single donation of television programs
to an American archives or library. The NBC News Archives
remains responsible for the preservation of news film and
videotape, archival databases, film and tape libraries and
warehouses worldwide. Most of its holdings are consolidated in
the New York area.

NBC Film and Videotape Inventory

News 600,000 film reels (currently estimated at
100,000,000 feet) (71)
1,600,000 videotapes

Entertainment included in above figure

Sports included in above figure

N.B. They did not indicate any separate figures for long-form
documentaries and screen magazines; the outtakes and trims
that survive are incorporated into the above number for NBC
News.

The preservation program aims at providing good storage
conditions and the large scale transfer of 2-inch and 3/4-inch
tapes. In its facilities in New York, NBC stores its film at
50 degrees F and 50% RH and its tape at 65 degrees and 50% RH.
For reformatting, NBC is also going to analog and digital
copies in Betacam SP and D-3. NBC News distinguishes itself
from ABC and CBS by its continuing loyalty to Matsushita
formats. Thus, NBC News has large quantities of M-II and a
growing number of D-3 video cassettes, both marketed under the
Panasonic brand name. NBC's operation of the NBC Super
Channel in Europe, its joint venture with MicroSoft, and its
decision to establish a 24-hour news channel will place
increased demands on the archives since the requirement for
program footage will significantly increase.

NBC News plans to upgrade its database system to improve
access to the archival holdings. The new system will use
digitized sounds and images to accelerate access to the
audiovisual content of the footage. The plans also call for an
improved storage facility with cooler storage conditions as
well as the ability to separate multiple copies to prevent
catastrophic loss. By the end of 1996 NBC expects to complete
transferring all of its uncopied 2-inch tapes using an outside
videotape restoration laboratory as well as its own
facilities. Consistent with reports from the other networks,
NBC News has observed that the 3/4-inch tapes have shown the
most dramatic deterioration and they too believe the volume
of 3/4-inch will be the next greatest challenge to the
preservation of television news. Notwithstanding, NBC News
plans to preserve all of its footage. In 1996 NBC began a
program to transfer 70,000 hours to a digital format.(72)

CNN

CNN, established in 1980, has amassed more than 600,000 video
cassettes, mostly housed at the CNN headquarters in Atlanta.
As byproducts of CNN's electronic news gathering, the tapes
are used in support of the company production needs for CNN,
Headline News, CNN International, and other programs. CNN is
too young to have inherited the problems of the older tapes,
and so the archives consists of 1-inch type C, 3/4-inch U-
matic, and Betacam/SP, all analog formats. Since these formats
are still viable no large scale transfer program has been
undertaken. The tapes themselves are stored in an air
conditioned environment with office-like settings. Many
cassettes are held in CNN bureau libraries which share
inventory information through a central library computer
system. Approximately 5% of the database is available on the
FootageNet website; like ABC's, the entries are primarily
tailored for production use.

Copies of featured shows such as Crossfire, Inside Politics,
and Larry King Live, are recorded and saved. However,
completed or anchored news broadcasts are not recorded and
saved as separate entities, only the video from the news
stories covered in the broadcasts.
All stories from CNN reporters and all field cassettes are
retained. All broadcast programming on major news stories
like the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the Oklahoma City
bombing, and the six weeks of the Gulf War are saved.

Like NBC News, CNN does not register its newscasts for
copyright, and as a result, few copyright deposit copies have
found their way to the Library of Congress. Virtually none of
the featured news programs have been registered. Recently,
however, CNN agreed to make for the Library of Congress copies
of its six weeks of 24-hour coverage of the Gulf War,
including its satellite feeds, and selected Larry King Live
programs.(73)

General assessment of network programs

Despite several recent positive steps to advance preservation
within the corporate environment, film preservation as
practiced by the larger film archives and the major studios
scarcely exists in the world of network television. The
resources allocated to the preservation of television film are
meager, matched against the footage's potential historical
value. Though the networks have impressive resources,
including outstanding technical expertise, for the
preservation of videotape, they are awash in an ocean of
cassettes that will potentially lead to great losses. Under
present circumstances, film and videotape are too much a part
of the production process. Few fundamental changes are in the
offing. A strategic plan for the future of television film
and videotape seems lacking. This failure is rooted in a
certain reluctance to establish a formal archival program that
requires some tough decisions about appraisal criteria,
disposition, and preservation.

None of the networks really has an archival program in any
traditional sense. They have "archives," to be sure, that are
the unique records of a corporation, film and videotape
included, produced and accumulated during the course of its
business or day-to-day activities. The records have a
consistent form and character depending upon when they were
made, and they have an organic quality which makes them part
of a larger entity. Two other features traditionally
distinguish archives in a corporate environment. One is the
records must be noncurrent in nature, i.e., not needed for
current business operations. The other is that they have some
permanent or enduring value to warrant the continuing expense
of long-term retention whether for research or production
purposes. Once appraised or otherwise identified as archives
the records, regardless of form, are physically separated and
afforded special status in order that they can be safeguarded
and prioritized for preservation work. Most importantly,
because they are corporate archives, their historical
integrity as records must be protected and they must be
safeguarded from loss, theft, physical damage, erasure, or
alteration. These are fundamental concepts in any records
management program.

Many of the preservation problems which the networks face stem
from their apparent inability to apply records management
principles to their film and videotape holdings, perpetually
treated as stock footage and not as part of the records of
America's greatest corporations. For all practical purposes
all their holdings are considered current since they are
potentially needed for re-broadcast or, more frequently, as
inserts or stock footage. In considering news films and field
cassettes few distinctions are made between originals and
copies. In extreme cases, film originals have been cut and
excised. Thousands of items may be in circulation, essentially
beyond the control of the archives staff, for any length of
time since everything is subservient to the always compelling
needs of producers. Under current patterns of use all footage,
however culturally or historically valuable, recent or
vintage, is subject to loss or abuse.(74)

The failure to identify the real archives in manageable
increments has been detrimental for the corporation as well as
for the public, which needs to be reassured that the most
important items will be preserved. The benefits of cold
storage for color film have been widely known among the
public film archives since the early 1970's. Yet the networks
have only recently started to use cooler conditions, and even
now none meets the ANSI standard of 35øF., the maximum
recommended temperature setting for the long-term storage of
color film. For this reason, it is easy to predict that
network color film will eventually fade beyond reasonable
recovery. NBC now stores its film at 50 degrees/50% RH and
CBS Entertainment at 40 degrees/20% RH, important steps in the
right direction. But no component of ABC, including ABC Circle
Films, nor of CBS News is using cold storage facilities for
color film holdings. There is no systematic film preservation
program in place for either the television features or the
news film, no making of interpositives, no copying of magnetic
sound tracks, no transfers to improved color emulsions or even
to videotape, and none of the other steps necessary to ensure
that the film's subject matter will survive in a quality form.
The networks are light years behind the major studios in
setting up systematic preservation programs to protect their
motion picture film assets. As the news divisions do not at
the present time seem capable of taking film preservation too
seriously, one can envision crash programs in the not too
distant future to transfer large quantities of their film to
videotape.

The networks have fared better with video preservation and all
have rightfully singled out their 2-inch tapes for action,
copying them to analog and digital formats. NBC will have
copied all of its tapes by the end of 1996. ABC has completed
theirs except for 10,000 hours from the Sports Division. CBS,
however, has about 20,000 left to copy in Los Angeles and the
facilities to accomplish this work in the next two or three
years. CBS News has 10,000 2-inch tapes in New York, but given
the priorities at the CBS Broadcast Center, it remains to be
seen whether they can be copied using CBS's internal
resources. A CBS official once opined it may already be too
late, but is now more optimistic based on the successful
completion of the Martin-Goodson transfer project.

Network news departments face many similar challenges and
preservation problems. Among the most important are the tens
of thousands of unprocessed cartons of films and tapes from
long-form documentary, public affairs, and screen magazine
programs. As the outtakes and trims and other production
elements, they contain much more footage of interviews and
events than could be shown in the final cuts. Some years ago
the National Archives received the outtakes from two excellent
NBC News documentaries on the decision to drop the first
atomic bomb on Japan during World War II and the Japanese
surrender. The outtakes contained lengthy and remarkable
interviews with many of the principals, including Robert
Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves. As American Experience
producer Judy Crichton noted at the New York hearing, "Where
I'm concerned about what was said earlier is that as a former
television journalist, I know that the single most valuable
material is often in the outtakes, that the compression of
time--yes, you'll have minutes of emptiness at a podium, but
that isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about the
attitudes of people before they make public pronouncements.
Their asides, the things that strip away the facade and let
you begin to understand what is real and what is contrived."
Yet at CBS and ABC materials such as these outtakes and trims
remain boxed with no provision for preservation. NBC News does
not maintain separate files of film and tape from the long-
form documentaries and screen magazines but integrates them
into the larger files.

Another major problem which they share is that of the millions
of video field cassettes, already approaching unmanageable
proportions. All networks agree that 3/4-inch video cassettes
pose the next challenge due to noticeable deterioration on
some tapes and the massive quantity they represent;
conservatively estimated as 3-4,000,000 for ABC, CBS, NBC, and
CNN combined. The cassettes possess the same potential
historical value as outtakes and trims from the documentary
productions for similar reasons. All the networks have stated
in principle their desire to retain all cassettes. CBS
maintains it still has all of theirs, but some large-scale
disposal has already taken place by ABC.

In fact all networks initially review field cassettes to
determine what should be "archived" or erased and recycled.
The initial screening criteria are of a very general nature,
emphasizing potential production values and leaving much to
the discretion of staff who may or may not have appropriate
training or research experience outside the field of broadcast
communications. This poses the danger that research needs
beyond television production may go unrecognized.

However well intentioned, the networks tend to keep too much
of the unedited news film and the field cassettes. On the
positive side, it is less likely that important materials will
be discarded because it didn't match the corporate criteria or
some whimsical notion of what constitutes historical value.
But failure to refine these inventories can also have dire
consequences in this contemporary era of abundant
documentation. The huge volume of materials makes the
acquisition of a facility for long-term storage too expensive,
and so it just isn't done. Important items are intermixed with
ephemera. Prioritization and preservation planning become
impracticable. The risk of loss or damage to unique copies is
ever present. Associated costs such as contract storage,
cataloging, research time, etc., are all increased. Any
expectation that several million 3/4-inch field cassettes,
only the first such format, will be re-formatted even in the
next century is naive or unduly optimistic. The economic
resources will not be available under any foreseeable
circumstances. What is foreseen is a helter-skelter pattern of
survival that will serve neither the corporate nor public
interests.

The networks should implement a self-imposed moratorium on
destruction of film and tape until a comprehensive records
management plan has been formulated which takes into account
the corporate needs, the interests of public archives, and
future research by scholars. While the networks may be well
equipped to forecast the commercial value of their programs
and potential production usefulness and while they can
identify award-winning programs or other programs of merit, it
is unfair to ask them to judge what may be useful for the
future research needs of historians and other scholars. From
the viewpoint of scholars, the networks are least equipped to
deal with questions of historical or cultural value, yet this
is the area where scholars feel so powerless and isolated.
Accordingly, the networks should establish advisory
committees, composed of representatives from public archives
and the scholarly community, to assist in developing
disposition policies, including retention, disposal, or
donation.

The networks should begin to identify and set aside the real
film and videotape archives and allocate to them the special
status they merit as the permanent archives of a great
corporation. In order to accomplish this they will need to
draw up a set of appraisal criteria that should include at a
minimum all programs produced by the news divisions as aired
and special events coverage.(75) CNN, in particular, should
record and retain at least one "anchored news broadcast" every
day in addition to all featured programs. Suitable cutoff
dates need to be established for retirement of programs to the
corporate archives or, preferably, to a public repository
where they can be made available for research and study. For
example, there is little reason for any program dated prior to
1980 to remain in active use.

The application of appraisal criteria will present the
greatest difficulty in the areas of news film and field
cassettes and unprocessed cartons of documentary/magazine
materials. Managing these materials en masse risks the loss of
the most historically valuable subjects, because there is no
system of triage to ensure their survival. Under the present
systems, something as important as the kinescope recordings of
Army-McCarthy hearings are not singled out for special
treatment. No transcript can ever convey the intense drama of
this event captured on film, and snippets in subsequent
productions just will not suffice. Any loss or damage would be
unconscionable. Sampling as a method of selection would not
be acceptable because it does not take into account future
research needs but dictates them.

For commercial reasonsl, the networks aim to save all sports
and entertainment programs, which is all well and good.
However, their efforts may be derailed if the basic film stock
preprint elements are not identified and placed in proper
storage, particularly for color film. In addition, they need
to follow the major studios' programs for making
interpositives for protection and security, copying
disintegrating magnetic sound tracks, and storing copies in
separate geographic locations.

Although the networks contribute generously to the activities
of the Museum of Television and Radio, whose acquisitions
document the history of broadcasting in the United States, it
is in their interests to enlarge the flow of copies into
public archives where they can be housed and serviced to
scholars consistent with the protection afforded under
copyright law. NBC News should be encouraged to register its
evening news broadcasts for copyright, joining ABC and CBS.
CNN has registered a very small number of programs, but its
recent agreement to transfer a copy of its entire Gulf War
broadcasts to the Library of Congress is a good precedent.
They should continue with other donations as well as
registration. CBS still retains all of its kinescopes of
programs or coverage that was broadcast, while ABC and NBC
have deposited theirs with public archives. CBS should be
encouraged to follow this example.

Only through periodic transfers or donations and through
continuing dialogue with public archives and scholars can the
networks demonstrate their commitment to preservation. Public
archives can help the networks by offering security of copies,
preservation, cataloging, and public access, including
fulfillment of scholarly requests which are too expensive for
the networks to handle. Public archives benefit by enhancing
their holdings, which attract more researchers; by fulfilling
their mission or institutional objectives; by positioning
their institution for grants and additional donations; and,
overall, by justifying their existence as research
institutions. Close cooperation between the networks and
public archives is therefore mutually beneficial.

C. PUBLIC TELEVISION

General Introduction

Despite historically small audiences, public television has
been responsible for the production, broadcast, and
dissemination of some of the most important programs which in
aggregate form the richest audiovisual source of cultural
history in the United States. In an age where the
multiplicity of cable television program outlets has shifted
the paradigm to noncommercial/public television, it is still
not easy to overstate the immense cultural value of this
unique audiovisual legacy, whose loss would symbolize one of
the great conflagrations of our age, tantamount to the burning
of Alexandria's library in the age of antiquity.

The history of public television in the United States has
always been one of financial uncertainty that has discouraged
long-range planning, leaving few resources for the development
of archives or preservation projects. Furthermore, public
television's administrative complexity has fragmented and
diluted preservation to such an extent that extensive
duplication of effort and serious losses seem almost
inevitable.

Three key events in the history of public broadcasting may,
however, provide a reason for optimism. First, the Public
Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting, mandated the CPB "to establish and
maintain a library and archives of noncommercial educational
television or radio programs and related programs." Second,
the National Public Broadcasting Archives was established in
1990, with very modest startup money from CPB. Third, in 1993
the Public Broadcasting Service and the Library of Congress
entered into an agreement providing for the periodic transfer
(after their rights have expired) of virtually all television
programs that pass through the PBS system.

Corporation for Public Broadcasting

The public television system (leaving aside the radio
dimension, though it is also an important component) consists
of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Public
Broadcasting Service, and PBS affiliate stations around the
nation.(76) There were only eleven public or noncommercial
television stations in 1955, broadcasting several hours a day.
They increased very slowly at first until federal funding for
television was introduced in 1962; by 1985 290 were
operating;(77) and today there are 345.

As recommended by the Carnegie Commission on Educational
Television, Congress created the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting in 1967 under the provisions of the Public
Broadcasting Act.(78) Under this law Congress intended to
promote the growth of nonpolitical and noncommercial
educational broadcasting and programming diversity responding
to the needs and interests in particular locations throughout
the United States. Congress intended to promote public
television as a means of expression of diversity and
excellence nationally and locally. Under this legislation CPB
acts as a federally funded grant-making organization that
issues grants or contracts to program makers and distributors,
particularly public broadcasting stations. CPB receives
virtually all of its funding from the federal government. This
infrastructure consisting of CPB, PBS affiliates, and other
grantees has resulted in extensive programming directed at
viewers with cultural and intellectual interests and at those
having an interest in documentaries, children's programming
and subjects relating to ethnic minorities. Performing arts
programming has been the hallmark of public television.

Since 1981 the CPB has collaborated with the Annenberg
Foundation to develop educational programs based on a grant
from publisher Walter Annenberg of 150 million dollars.(79)
The Annenberg Foundation retains distribution rights for any
programs developed under this project. Over 1700 programs have
been produced since 1983. As a rule CPB has no copyright or
distribution rights to any of the programs that it helps
develop or support. Such rights usually reside with the
affiliate or independent producer.

Among the responsibilities Congress mandated to CPB is "to
establish and maintain a library and archives of noncommercial
educational television or radio programs and related
materials...," a requirement never fulfilled. Overall CPB
believes that preservation is effected through the work of PBS
and its affiliates, and therefore has never maintained an
archives of past programming. CPB requires grantees to furnish
video copies for review; those for the period 1969-87 have
been donated to the National Public Broadcasting Archives,
established at the University of Maryland in 1990. Cassettes
from 1987 onward, about 2,800, are still maintained by CPB,
but there is no provision for public access by
researchers.(80) Periodically additional cassettes along with
noncurrent CPB paper records will be transferred to the NPBA,
where they will be accessible to researchers.

CPB's other major activity relating to the preservation of the
history of public broadcasting has been an annual donation to
the Museum of Television and Radio that has resulted in the
acquisition of about 30 hours of programming per year and the
cataloging, maintenance, and preservation of 60 hours per year
from earlier acquisitions.(81)

Public Broadcasting Service
CPB established the Public Broadcasting Service in 1969 as a
national broadcaster and distributor of the programs produced
with CPB funds or by PBS affiliates. Like CPB, PBS is neither
a producer nor a copyright holder of the programs it
broadcasts or distributes. But it is the essential
organization that provides the network and a sense of unity
within the public broadcasting family. PBS derives its income
from a pro-rated system of fees charged to affiliate stations
for different kinds of programming; from corporate donations;
and from CPB itself. In 1986, for example, the breakdown was
estimated at 27%, 37%, and 15%, respectively.(82)

An internal report in January 1977 concluded that after 24
years of noncommercial television, "there is no program
archive or aural-visual history of public television in the
United States.... There is no full-time staff member at any
national public broadcasting organization who devotes his time
exclusively to archive planning--let alone implementation."
The report held out some hope with the passage of the American
Television and Radio Archives Act as part of the Copyright Act
of 1976 that the Library of Congress would develop a
comprehensive plan "to preserve the nation's radio and
television history, both commercial and non-commercial."(83)
The expectation that the Library of Congress would eventually
assume responsibility for the preservation and access of past
programs broadcast by PBS was reinforced by the 1976 agreement
that National Public Radio made with the Library and the
National Archives for the transfer of cultural programs and
news and public affairs programs, respectively, to each
repository.

From 1979 to 1983 PBS operated a Public Television Library and
Broadcast Archive Services for internal use. During this time,
assisted by an earmarked CPB grant, PBS relocated the NET
programs from Michigan to an off-site facility in Virginia
with improved storage conditions. In response to a lowered
budget forecast, archival operations ceased in 1983, the
director of the program was terminated, an action that
prompted public criticism by the archival community. PBS
retains custody of a staggering amount of past broadcasts,
estimated at over 100,000 items, virtually every PBS
broadcast.(84) Only some 7,000 programs are current in the
sense that PBS still has either re-broadcast or distribution
rights. Rights to the bulk of the holdings have expired. The
copies on file represent everything that went on the air since
1970, often with two copies of each program since producers or
suppliers were required to submit a master or backup copy. The
formats are varied but include 1-inch, 2-inch, D-2 and D-3
videotapes. Currently PBS requires producers to supply a D-3
master and backup copy which PBS keeps indefinitely. Finding
aids are partial or incomplete, there is no comprehensive
database inventory, and researchers do not have any access
privileges. Researchers are referred to the NPBA, which has
2,000 3/4-inch PBS viewing cassettes on file, or to the
Library of Congress.

After several years of negotiations in September 1993 PBS and
the Library of Congress signed a major agreement for the
transfer of the "best copy" of "all PBS programs that have
been or will be broadcast, whether on film, videotape, or
other broadcast format yet to be developed...."(85) In
effect, this agreement makes the Library of Congress the
ultimate custodian and public repository for virtually all
programs broadcast on PBS, past, present, and future. When
fulfilled just for the past programs alone, the agreement will
represent the largest single donation of television materials
to any one institution. Estimated noncurrent broadcasts
exceed more than 90,000 items. Unfortunately neither neither
PBS nor the Library is in a position to accept or prepare all
the materials for transfer. So far the Library has received
about 9,000 National Educational Television films and tapes
from the 1950s-1970s, and 16,000 2-inch videotapes and
kinescopes. PBS needs assistance to inventory and prepare the
balance of materials for transfer. The Library requires
additional storage space and processing staff to handle them.
As PBS requires fairly quick access to the donated materials
for on-going operations, the time frame needed to make copies
has been a matter of concern between the two
organizations.(86) PBS no longer has the resources to re-
format 2-inch videotape and depends upon the Library for this
service.

National Public Broadcasting Archives

At this juncture it is important to understand the
relationship of CPB and PBS to the National Public
Broadcasting Archives established in 1990 at the University of
Maryland by the late Dr. Donald R. McNeil. His interests
focused primarily on the paper records of public broadcasting
organizations which he believed, justifiably so, have great
research value in documenting the development of public
broadcasting organizations in the United States. Prior to the
establishment of the NPBA "nothing existed in the way of
systematic archive activity within public broadcasting,"
according to the current director.(87) Accordingly, McNeil
arranged for the deposit of the records from CPB, PBS, and
NPR, assuming the Library of Congress and the National
Archives would eventually take care of the audiovisual
collections.

Subsequently collections policies were modified to allow
acceptance of audiovisual materials with the argument (1)
that some program material was in danger of being overlooked,
and (2) that the NPBA could enhance the research value of the
archives by having video reference copies available for
consultation along with the paper records. The acquisition,
however, of 1-inch and 2-inch tapes goes beyond the concept
of reference or study copies.

Table 10: National Public Broadcasting Archives

Videotape/Kinescope Inventory

2,000 3/4-inch study copies from PBS

100 1-inch tapes from Maryland Public Broadcasting (MPB)

500 3/4-inch and 1/2-inch tapes from MPB

500 kinescopes from American Instructional Technology (AIT)

200 2-inch tapes from AIT

The holdings also include coverage of town meetings, concerts, and professional tennis matches from the 1970's.
The archives expects to receive additional materials from PBS,
MPT, and WETA.

The NPBA is making a deliberate effort to save and document
some representative examples of educational or instructional
television, and it is developing a system of selection to
prioritize materials for re-mastering. But it also assumes
that some materials will be left as is with little opportunity
for converting them to modern formats.

PBS Affiliate Stations

Currently there are 345 PBS affiliate stations throughout the
United States and its territories. Some fall under the
control of state or municipal governments. Others are part of
universities or public school systems. And others are
independent community-based organizations whose major sources
of income depend upon CPB and foundation grants, donations,
and solicitations.

Two public television stations, WNET in New York and WGBH in
Boston, produce the majority of programming broadcast on PBS.
Broadcasting since 1962 (then WNDT), WNET reaches the largest
audience since it is licensed in densely populated New York
and New Jersey. It has presented programs on arts, history,
nature, science, public affairs and is the premier performing
arts station through its long-running Great Performances
series. Like most stations WNET has acquired a large inventory
of program materials even though it has donated unedited film
and tapes and other materials such as film inserts to
specialized performing arts collections. Nonetheless, WNET
occasionally relies upon the "master" collection at PBS and
the Library of Congress, in cases where copies have already
gone to them. Programs that originated on film, such as
numerous documentaries, only exist as videotapes. WNET had no
means to maintain film versions. Many programs are endangered
because the means to identify them are not available. Changes
or nuances from program to program will be oblivious due to
lack of adequate documentation. Two-inch tapes lack viewing
cassettes, making them virtually unavailable for staff use.
Public television has created a unique video record, according
to a WNET spokesman, but "but public television is far too
financially vulnerable to salvage what it has created."(88)

WGBH in Boston produces about a third of the programs
broadcast on PBS, including such well known series as NOVA,
This Old House, The French Chef: Julia Child, Frontline, and
The American Experience. Among all public broadcasting
stations, WGBH is unique because it has established a formal
records management and archives programs staffed by fulltime
professional archivists. Founded in 1979 and intended as a
model for other PBS stations, the Media Archives and
Preservation Center operates under the auspices of the WGBH
Educational Foundation. The television archives probably has
the largest holdings among all the affiliates.

Table 11: WGBH Media Archives and Preservation Center Inventory

37,000 reels of film

131,000 videotapes

14,000 cartons of outakes and related production documentation

N.B. Includes approximately 6,000 hours of masters of WGBH programming.

Unlike the other stations, WGBH retains outtakes and other materials relating to
documentary productions, develops finding aids, and makes them
available to outside researchers and scholars. Producers are
required to turn in outtakes at the project's completion.
The outtakes to The Promise of the American Negro, for
example, contain lengthy interviews with James Baldwin,
Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King.(89) As an indication of
their continuing research value, the outtakes and production
files relating to WGBH's production of Vietnam: A Television
History, were donated to the University of Massachusetts,
where they are available for study.(90) WGBH retains the
rights to the documentaries produced for The American
Experience.

Another unique aspect of WGBH's preservation program is the
use of barium ferrite videotape for archival masters, one of
the most stable forms of videotape designed for special
applications.

Nonetheless, WGBH lacks facilities for the long-term storage
of color film; 85% of their film is color. Almost 6,000 reels
of obsolete 2-inch tape and 1200 hours of open-reel 1/2-inch
tape remain uncopied. Assisted by a Bentley Library grant,
they are in the process of developing selection criteria to
assist in determining the priority of tapes to be copied.

WETA is the third largest producer for public television, well
known for such programs as The Newshour with Jim Lehrer,
Washington Week in Review, The Kennedy Center Presents, In
Performance at the White House, and The Civil War. It has
already transferred some videotapes, 1966-1977, to the NPBA
and some copies to the National Archives and the Library of
Congress (Watergate hearings). It has about 10,000 hours on
hand representing program materials from 1978 to the present,
and anticipates increases as the rate of about 400 hours per
year. WETA does try to assist outside researchers when
possible despite cataloging and staffing limitations. The
rights to the materials are very complex to administer and in
recognition of this problem WETA keeps a "pedigree" file on
each program to document ownership.(91)

Assessment

1. From the 1950s to 1962 the Ford Foundation was the main
sponsor of educational television, contributing 82 million
dollars for the productions and operations of NET. Yet there
is little evidence that the Foundation has tried to assist in
saving any record of early educational television.

2. CPB has never fulfilled the Congressional mandate to
establish an audiovisual archives, assuming the work was being
carried out through PBS and its affiliates. The traditional
meaning of archives in the United States, particularly those
based on tax-supported funding, implies public access and
preservation activities taking place. CPB has never taken
these responsibilities for itself but assumed they were being
carried out by other organizations. Since production and
transmission remain the most important priorities, little is
left over for preservation. Therefore, CPB cannot carry out
Congress' other mandate at a meaningful level.

3. Probably the greatest need to shore up the preservation
activities of public broadcasting is simply coordination,
which can be brought about by the sharing of information. A
multiplicity of copies exist throughout the PBS system. Any
program that goes out on the air could have been videotaped
and retained. Theoretically as many as 345 copies of one
program for which PBS no longer holds broadcast rights can be
dispersed among PBS affiliates. In the absence of
coordination these duplicates will adversely affect
preservation storage and re-mastering plans.

A. Affiliates should identify their own indigenous
programs and make them a priority for preservation. Programs
that no longer have any potential for re-broadcast should be
offered to local area archives or to specialized archives
before outright destruction. Outtakes from documentary
productions should also be considered for transfer rather than
disposal.

B. The creation and sharing of comprehensive inventory
databases seem essential for achieving any real success in
coordinating the efforts of affiliates.
C. The PBS-Library of Congress agreement should be viewed
as complementary to the individual preservation efforts of
affiliates. There are many affiliate productions that were
never broadcast on PBS.

D. PBS should take a leading role in communicating vital
preservation information to its affiliates through mailings or
through its electronic communications system.

4. Since the Library of Congress has assumed responsibility
for storing, processing, re-formatting and servicing all past,
present, and future PBS transmissions, the Library will
ultimately require additional funding which should come from
CPB.

5. Like the networks, none of the public broadcasting
organizations is taking the preservation of color film very
seriously. Color originals, negatives, or masters are not
placed in cold storage meeting ANSI's minimum specifications.
Their color film will therefore fade at a rapid rate, and much
valuable historical information, particularly interviews, will
be lost. Their magnetic, double system sound elements are
also at risk of loss. As recommended elsewhere in this report,
their most important film elements should be copied to
videotape if they do not intend to carry out a color film and
sound track preservation program.

6. Affiliates that are part of state or municipal entities
should seek local or regional funding for preservation
activities: some funding from NHPRC may also be available.

7. Affiliates should take a close look at the WGBH Media
Archives and Preservation Center as a model for some of the
larger producers of programming material.

LARGEST PUBLIC ARCHIVES

A. Library of Congress

Soon to have custody of almost 300,000 television items, the
Library of Congress is the largest public archives in the
United States. The Library's extensive television holdings,
not to mention other audiovisual collections, stem from
copyright registrations as required by law; and, from
donations received through the generosity and cooperation of
private individuals and organizations. The Library received
its first television program in 1949 as a copyright
registration. The Copyright Act of 1976 rapidly accelerated
the registration and receipt of television programs.

Among the largest donations are the NET, PBS, and NBC
Collections. Under a 1993 transfer agreement, the Library is
scheduled to receive all programs aired and retained by PBS,
in the past, present, and future, which in the next few years
could exceed over 100,000 items. Like the National Archives,
the Library also receives videotapes of Congressional floor
proceedings. The Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded
Sound Division is responsible for the management of the
television collections and provides services to researchers.

The Copyright Act of 1976 established the American Television
and Radio Archives within the Library of Congress. This has
resulted in the creation of a broadcasting preservation
activity rather than a separate administrative unit or
collections maintained as separate entities under ATRA. One
activity, for example, is the Library's cooperative
arrangement with the Vanderbilt University's Television News
Archive for the acquisition of videotapes of network
television newscasts. For administrative efficiency, archival
processing and reference services for television materials are
combined with similar work for motion pictures.

The Library's television preservation strategy relies upon
beneficial storage conditions, in particular, cold or cool
storage, with fairly low relative humidity, for its archival
or master copies of film and videotape. Much to the envy of
other public archives, the Library maintains a large
laboratory, capable of working with many different video
formats, although much of the 2-inch transfer work is
contracted to a commercial vendor. The Library currently
reformats videotapes to 1-inch type C as a master and to 3/4-
inch U-matic for access, both of which use analog signal
systems. The Library considers 1-inch to have a continuing
viability for at least another ten years, in terms of the
availability of equipment. Because of security concerns, the
Library uses U-matic tapes (not VHS) for reference services
because U-matic is not suitable for home use. Original
videotapes accessioned as Betacam SP or D2 are considered
masters in their own right.

B. UCLA's Film and Television Archive

UCLA's Film and Television Archive maintains the second
largest television collection in the country accessible to
scholars and other researchers. From its vantage point in the
Los Angeles area as a center of production, the archives has
been able to interact with the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences, the creative and production communities, independent
producers and the major studios, even widows and heirs of
television personages, to amass a huge and eclectic inventory
of television programs dating from the start of broadcast
history. Current estimates are 60,000 television titles, and
almost 200,000 including news and public affairs. The holdings
include a broad range of American commercial and public
television programming both regional and local, with special
strengths in the 1950's. The archives's origin stemmed from an
agreement with the National Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences in 1965, resulting in the creation of a National
Television Library, subsequently combined with the
university's growing collection of American cinema. Among
UCLA's most important collections are the Emmy nominees and
winners, early broadcasts from the Dumont Network, Hallmark
Hall of Fame programs, and the ABC kinescopes for 24,000
programs.

The archival program closely supports and supplements the
academic curriculum, especially at the university's film and
television school. Therefore the archive has properly
emphasized cataloging access as a very high priority.
Accordingly, almost 95% of the holdings, though not fully
cataloged, are retrievable through the university's computer
network, ORION, also accessible through the Internet. The
university has recently constructed a new storage facility to
house this important collection.

SPECIALIZED PUBLIC ARCHIVES: A SELECTION

A. National Archives and Records Administration

A federal repository for the permanently valuable records of
the United States
Government, NARA has accessioned extensive quantities of
broadcast television programs as well as videotape records
used for documentation. Current estimates include 75,000 reels
of film made for televised use and 42,000 videotapes. Within
the federal establishment videotape has supplanted motion
picture film as the prime recording medium for moving images
for both civilian and military agencies. Public information
programs, research and development footage like NASA's, the
Office of Economic Opportunity's experiments with community
programs, and USIA WorldNet programs intended for overseas
audiences, to mention a few examples, exist as videotape
recordings. Military operations, including the invasions of
Grenada and Panama and the Gulf War, are documented on
videotape. The House and Senate floor proceedings are another
important source of video documentation, amounting to more
than 2,000 recorded hours each year.(92) Even some federal
courts have required videotape recordings of proceedings on an
experimental basis. In view of all this activity, it is clear
that the primary moving image record of American heritage at
the national level of experience will depend upon the
successful management of large inventories of videotape
recordings.

Among NARA's holdings are kinescopes of the important
Chronoscope television interview series broadcast by CBS,
1951-55, donated by the sponsor, Longines-Wittnauer, without
restriction. NARA has also received videotapes of the MacNeil-
Lehrer News Hour, C-SPAN original programming, and CBS News
daily newscasts and special events coverage dating from 1974
to the present. During the Vietnam War the Defense Department
made kinescopes of network newscast coverage of the war, 1965-
74, from the three major networks and circulated copies to
military posts overseas. Now in NARA's custody, the kinescopes
for the first three years, 1965-1968, including newscasts of
the Tet Offensive, are unique because the Vanderbilt
Television News Archive only started operating in August 1968
and the networks themselves did not save copies of entire
newscasts until the 1970's, when they could do so using 3/4-
inch cassettes.

The presidential library system, managed nationwide by NARA,
contains extensive holdings of television and video materials
pertaining to individual presidential administrations from
Herbert Hoover to George Bush. Altogether there are
approximately 36,000 television subjects on 10,000 reels of
film and 53,000 videotapes. The majority of them stem from
White House coverage of official public appearances and acts,
solicited and unsolicited donated materials, and programs
copied off the air.

Technically, NARA's holdings reflect a variety of video
formats although the 2-inch format failed to make much of an
impact among federal agencies, except in the White House
itself during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon
administrations. NARA's video preservation strategy centers
on providing good storage conditions for the long-term storage
of videotape originals as exemplified in Archives II at
College Park, Maryland, and on making reference copies upon
request. Presidential Libraries have generally made excellent
progress in copying obsolete formats.

B. Public Affairs Video Archives

The Public Affairs Video Archives located at Purdue University
has a cooperative arrangement with C-SPAN, the public affairs
video network supported by cable television companies.(93)
Started in 1987, PAVA records all C-SPAN programming off-air,
including Congressional floor proceedings and selected
committee hearings, catalogues them, and distributes them to
scholars and researchers. All events are covered in their
entirety without commercial breaks. Approximately 5,000
programs totalling 7,000 hours each year are recorded on 6,000
S-VHS videotapes. For the first few years of operations, PAVA
used VHS as the master recording. PAVA holdings also include
about 3,000 3/4-inch cassettes deposited by C-SPAN. C-SPAN
transfers its program originals to the National Archives and
Records Administration under a separate deposit agreement.
Excluded from the agreement with NARA are video recordings of
Congressional proceedings, since NARA already receives copies
directly from the House and Senate.

As a unique feature, C-SPAN licenses PAVA to sell videotapes,
in their entirety or as compilations; the income returns to
PAVA to help defray the cost of operations. An estimated
12,000 videotapes will be distributed in 1996. In order to
stimulate interest in use of the programs, C-SPAN issues
grants to teachers or scholars which are redeemed at PAVA for
the purchase of video cassettes. This unusual arrangement
between a public archives and a broadcaster may serve as
useful model for the development of additional public-private
partnerships to safeguard American television and make it
available for use.

C. Political Commercial Archive

Another institution worth a special mention is the Political
Commercial Archive of the University of Oklahoma, which houses
about 37,000 television political commercials produced from
the 1950 to the present, illustrating many facets of American
political life at every level of government, including
elections, ballot issues, and advocacy on public policy
issues.(94) By a large measure, the archives owes its success
to its integration into the communications and political
science faculty where its holdings support the educational
objectives of the university. In fact, the archives is
extensively used by scholars and individuals from a variety of
institutions and backgrounds, further attesting to the
research value of these television materials. In recognition
of this value, the U.S. Department of Education over nine
years awarded the university $750,000 under Title II-2C of the
Higher Education Act, Strengthening Research Library
Resources, for use in cataloging the holdings, providing a
local database, and collections-level description for
OCLC.(95) The grant also enabled the archives to prepare 3/4-
inch and 1/2-inch video cassette access copies. The archives
has been the only television recipient of this award, and this
recognition encouraged the university to install a climate-
controlled vault for the long-term storage of the collection.
In addition, the National Endowment for the Humanities
announced a substantial grant for the archives's use only this
year.

D. New York Public Library Collections

Original documentation of the performing arts represents still
another kind of television or video genre, the largest
collections of which are held under the administrative
umbrella of the New York Public Library.(96) Such recordings
represent unique audiovisual documents of past performances,
something for which no written record can ever substitute.
When the recording deteriorates beyond use or succumbs to
format obsolescence, the researcher will never be able to
judge the performance for himself or herself. New York's
Library for the Performing Arts contains one of the world's
foremost collections of film and videotape of live theater
performances. The Dance Collection contains more than 8,000
videotapes that in aggregate have encouraged revolutionary
changes in the study of dance choreography since the
collection was established over thirty years ago. In addition
to acquisitions, both collections contain original video
recordings shot under the supervision of the archives to
document important performances. The archives also contains a
great deal of collateral documentation such as manuscripts,
memorabilia, clipping files and so on. The library funds the
operations of the collection, but must rely on outside support
for preservation activities. The collections receive frequent
use, aided by their ideal location at Lincoln Center, but lack
access copies and adequate storage conditions. Converting
obsolete formats has been done very selectively.

E. Awards Associations and Archives

Broadcasting awards associations have been important over the
years for identifying programs that have been recognized by
broadcasting professionals as superior productions based on
performances by actors, or on writing, directing, or some
other aspects of production by which the programs are judged.
Entertainment programs as well as documentaries, news, and
public affairs programs have received numerous awards and
comprise an important historical record of American
broadcasting. As a side benefit of the awards process, copies
of some program winners and nominees have been placed in
archives for safekeeping and public access. As noted above,
the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences regularly deposits
in UCLA its Emmy-award winning programs, plus the nominated
ones. The Leonard Library of San Francisco State University
receives Emmy winners from the local chapter of the National
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The Dupont Award-
winning programs in broadcast journalism are housed at the
Department of Communications at Columbia University.

The largest award collection is the Peabody Award Archive
maintained at the University of Georgia. Although the
archives was founded in 1976, its television holdings date
from 1948 and consist of 2800 reels of film and about 21,000
videotapes, including entries and winners. The collection
grows by more than 1,000 items yearly. Scholars and other
researchers benefit from these collections because of their
wide range of subject matter and because they represent all
television genres in national and local broadcasting, public
broadcasting, and even children's programming. Columbia
University does not have an archival program for its copies.
San Francisco State lacks the means to duplicate its
collection. UCLA can only make selective preservation copies,
and the Peabody Archive is limited to analog-to-analog
copying. All in all, there is no assurance that the content of
these collections will survive into the next century.

BROADCASTING MUSEUMS

A. Museum of Television and Radio

As an institution dedicated to promoting public access to the
audiovisual history of American broadcasting, the Museum of
Television and Radio has perhaps the nationþs most visible
television collection.(97) The basis for its success started
with a handsome endowment from William S. Paley, who from his
vantage point as founder of CBS, persuaded the other networks
to contribute programming to the museum's collections. First
established in 1975, the museum moved into a newly designed
building in midtown Manhattan in 1991, and, as another
milestone, opened a sister museum in Los Angeles in March
1996; it is now described as "one museum with two locations."

Approximately 50,000 television programs are included among
its holdings as well as some 10,000 television commercials.
Originals consist of videotape except for 5,000 film-based
subjects. The growth rate is estimated at 6% a year.

MTR has established a protection program based on the
principle of making a consistent or systematic master tape of
each program. This suited the museum objectives because in
many instances donors did not deed originals to the museum,
only copies made by the donor or by MTR itself. During the
1970's, when MTR first started operating, its master format of
choice was 3/4-inch U-matic; today it is mostly D-2, a digital
format. MTR uses Hi-8 for its reference copies and D-3 to
support its exhibits and other outreach activities. The entire
television holdings have been replicated in D-3 for the Los
Angeles site. MTR's preservation strategy assumes replacing
the U-matic masters, either by retrieving the originals and
re-copying them or by reproducing from the 3/4-inch cassettes.
Additionally, another feature of its strategy is to store
masters off site in a climate-controlled storage facility.

MTR complements the work of television archives primarily
through its efforts to interpret the history of American
broadcasting to the general public. Paley himself saw museum
interpretation as one of the greatest benefits for the general
public. MTR has carried out his vision by providing a user-
friendly research environment in attractive surroundings, open
to all visitors regardless of purpose or credentials, with
special accommodations for scholars, school groups, and
seminars. Altogether, the museum's outreach programs have
done much to raise the level of public awareness of the
importance of broadcasting in our history and culture. The
museum obtains funding from its endowment, from cash
donations, through in-kind donations from manufacturers of
television equipment and videotape, through voluntary
contributions at admission, marketing of museum products, and
through other sources.

In addition to exhibits and a variety of special programs, the
act of interpretation manifests itself in the collections. The
materials are acquired through contractual arrangements with
the networks, studios, and other producers, and through
solicited and unsolicited offers.
Regardless of source, the selections are governed by a desire
"to establish a balanced collection of significant programming
that represents all important genres." Selections are made of
national and local programming, including some representation
of international programming. Evaluation criteria include
historic significance, social relevance, and artistic
excellence, evidenced by awards. Scholars and the creative
community have an opportunity to influence staff selections.
Rarely does MTR keep entire runs of series, only what
represents the most important episodes or issues. Truly a
collection, with each item carefully selected according to the
staff's working criteria, the museum's holdings tend to
stimulate research in some areas while precluding it others,
and although its holdings may represent highlights of
materials held in television archives around the country, by
virtue of its selective policy, they do not duplicate other
holdings, in particular, in the area of television news.

B. Museum of Broadcast Communications

Founded in 1986, the Museum of Broadcast Communications is the
second largest broadcast museum program in the United States;
its collections document broadcasting history on a national
level with special emphasis on the Chicago metropolitan area
and the midwest. Currently it holds approximately 10,000
television programs and 8,000 commercials. The museum tends to
acquire originals and prepares master recordings on 3/4-inch
cassettes. Faced with significant arrearage in cataloging and
transferring originals, MBC has undertaken several innovative
steps to raise funds to support its work. It developed a
partnership with NBC for the transfer of 2-inch tapes of
Tomorrow interview shows featuring Tom Snyder in the 1960's
and 1970's. Though directed at its radio holdings, MBC
negotiated a donation to accompany the acquisition of radio
programs sponsored by the Wrigley Company of Chicago. It has
also experimented with grass roots campaigns to raise
money.(98)

CHAPTER FOUR:

LOCAL TELEVISION NEWS ARCHIVES

Introduction

The most devastating losses have already occurred among files
of news film and videotape produced by local television
stations throughout the United States, devastation that has
taken place because station owners and executives, often
remote from daily broadcasting operations, failed to see much
cost-benefit value in keeping recordings of old news. In the
mid-1970's, a period marked by the transition from 16mm news
film to 3/4-inch U-matic cassettes, about 700 commercial
television stations were operating in the United States. Less
than 10% of the stations transferred their news film to public
archives. The rest was mostly destroyed.

Converting broadcast operations to Electronic News Gathering
(ENG) prompted the wholesale destruction of entire film
libraries, some of which had spanned 25 years of local and
regional history, from the fifties to the seventies. From
management's point of view, news film files were unwieldy,
difficult to access, took up costly storage space, and, in an
industry that rarely looked toward its past, offered little
potential for rebroadcast. Some managers felt the files
represented legal liability if placed in the wrong hands.
Copies of complete newscasts were never saved because very few
were recorded; only the film inserts and millions and millions
of feet of field footage in small rolls were left over. Over
the years camera operators and archivists have traded ironic
stories of how entire libraries were discarded in dumpsters,
deliberately burned, or just given away. News film cameramen
frequently took what they wanted assuming it would only be
destroyed in the end.

Devastation of local news film libraries still continues.
Earlier in 1996 the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board
transferred local news footage to the National Archives
showing events in Dallas just before and after the
assassination of President Kennedy. A station employee had
kept the original footage for years as a personal possession
and later entrusted a copy to a friend. Last year a
projectionist noticed several cartons at a local Washington,
DC, station about to be discarded and casually asked for them.
The cartons contained rare local news film from the 1960's and
1970's, in a capital city where no news film libraries
survive. An on-camera interview with Sirhan Sirhan at a
protest against the United Nations taken before his
assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy was destroyed.(99)
At least one local station in New York has under consideration
a plan to destroy its news film, in a city where no commercial
footage has been placed in a public archives.

Widespread indifference toward the historical value of local
news footage has also continued into the era of videotape.
Like the network national news there is no FCC requirement
that local newscasts be saved. Video cassettes are mostly
erased and recycled. Stations rarely keep copies of complete
news programs more than a week. One journalist reported that
the video coverage of Jerry Brown's governorship in California
was expunged."Untold wholesale destruction has taken place
through the erasure and recycling of $20 video
cassettes."(100)

Harry Sweet, a local news cameraman who worked in the
Sacramento area, is one of the genuine rescuers of this
heritage. He persuaded KCRA to donate nine million feet to the
Sacramento History Center. Upon learning that KOVR's news
film was scheduled to be thrown out when their station moved
to new facilities, he rescued six million feet, 1967-81, for
the California State University at Sacramento. Among other
historic subjects, it contained coverage of the Robert Kennedy
presidential campaign in California and his assassination in
Los Angeles, the Symbionese Liberation Army's kidnapping of
Patty Hearst, and Ronald Reagan's inauguration as
governor.(101) Among his recollections, Sweet remembered
talking to someone who worked in a Pittsburgh station that had
just burned three million feet of news film.

A survey presented to the National Center for Film and Video
Preservation of the American Film Institute in 1986 sketched
out the devastation taking place to our television heritage
across the nation. The survey included 107 of the oldest
television stations in the United States, which tended to be
in the larger broadcasting markets. Of the 69 stations which
responded, only 22% kept news film; if one assumes stations
not responding likely did not retain news film either, then
only 14% of the surveyed 107 stations kept news film. This
confirmed the destruction of the vast majority of America's
earliest news film. The report further concluded that station
employees were generally not well informed about their film
holdings or about the voluntary moratorium on destruction the
Center was trying to promote.(102)

Currently almost 1700 commercial stations are broadcasting in
the United States.(103) In 1980, pretty much the end of
the news film era, 706 commercial stations were operating in
the United States. By any measure less than 10% of the news
film libraries survive.

A variety of institutions throughout the United States have
indicated custody of daily collections of television news.
(See Appendix C.)
--There are about 48 local television news collections in the
United States.(104)
--The total footage nationwide is estimated at over 100
million feet.
--Most have acquired local television news collections by
donation or solicitation.
--Only a very small number of local television news archives
acquire collections by recording off-air.
--At the present time local television archives have over
11,000 obsolete videotapes to copy.
--Organizationally local television archives can be described
as follows:
a. Historical societies: 13
b. Universities, public and private: 20
c. State and municipal organizations, including public
libraries, state archives,
and museums: 11
d. Other categories: 4
--Only 31 states have at least one local television news
collection.
--19 states have none.
--Many large metropolitan areas have no commercial local
television news collections in public archives, including
Boston, New York (public television news only), and
Washington.
--The number of local television news archives by region is as
follows:
Northeast 03
Mid-Atlantic 08
South 12
Central 14
West 11

At best these organizations maintain a loose professional
affinity, some through the Association of Moving Image
Archivists or the Society of American Archivists, and, due to
budgetary reasons or lack of interest, some not at all. In
1987 the National Center for Film and Video Preservation and
the State Historical Society of Wisconsin hosted the first
local television news conference, held in Madison and
sponsored by a grant from the National Historical Records and
Publications Commission (NHPRC). Representatives of 30 local
collections attended. Subsequent meetings have taken place
within AMIA's annual conference, and local television news
archivists have a means of communicating within AMIA's News
and Documentary Working Group. They represent the largest
constituency within AMIA. Nonetheless, this community needs to
define itself and improve communications between local
archives. The need for a second major local television news
archives conference is imperative. Ten years since the first
major conference is too long.

As it happens, the NHPRC has become the major financial
supporter of local television news collections. In 1991 the
Commission gave a grant to the National Center for Film and
Video Preservation to prepare a curatorial manual for the
management of television news film and videotape
collections.(105) In addition, the Commission has granted
about a half-million dollars to 11 local television news
projects to improve preservation and access.(106) Where
other major funding organizations have failed to take notice,
the Commission early recognized the historical value of these
collections. "From New York to California," Gerald George
testified, "from North Dakota to Mississippi, future scholars
and the public are going to be able to get at least some
glimpses of what life was like in 20th century America and
what our history looked like as it happened, thanks to the
work of NHPRC grantees with news film and video collections."
The Commission realizes, however, that its contributions can
scarcely address the full work load if "we are to assure the
people of this nation something more than a haphazard visual
record of its remarkable history...."

Regardless of NHPRC's very helpful support, the state of the
nation's local television news collections remains in reality
extremely desperate. Local archives have acquired television
collections without the necessary resources to care for them.
As result, several deplorable conditions typify the state of
most of these collections.

Insufficient staff for processing thousands of small film
clips or rolls, thus inhibiting access and preservation
work.
Nonexistent or idiosyncratic finding aids compiled at
local stations usually without the benefit of
professional librarians, again inhibiting research
access.
Use of originals and lack of reference copies, risking
permanent damage.
Lack of intermediate copies or protection copies.
Lack of a sufficient number of film viewers.
Lack of appropriate video playback and recording
equipment for anything but 3/4-inch and 1/2-inch formats.
Use of low resolution 1/2-inch for off-air copies as an
economy measure.
Lack of shelving space and other storage facilities,
which discourages dispersed storage.
Lack of professionally trained technical staff.
Lack of staff to devote exclusively to the management of
the television news collections.
No local television news archives indicated the
availability of cold storage facilities for color film
originals, and only small number indicated low humidity
storage, below 40%, for film and videotape.
Most local archives did not receive underlying rights and
title along with the physical property, a condition that
has prevented them from earning preservation funds from
the potentially lucrative sale of stock footage.

Two case models: San Francisco State University and the Louis
Wolfson II Media History Center.

These two archives are worth discussing in some detail not
because they represent two extremes but because their problems
are symptomatic of the entire field, and yet they have
achieved a certain measure of success while working with
limited resources.

Established in 1981, the archival program at the Leonard
Library of San Francisco State University centers around news
film from KPIX and KQED, both local affiliates. The holdings
document the rich and colorful history of San Francisco.
Altogether there are about ten million feet. Not having
received a transfer of copyright, the archives earns no income
from the sale of stock footage but does charge a $35 per hour
research fee to reimburse the archives for some of the staff
time.

Since 1981, the archives has received $135,000 in grants,
including $55,000 from the NHPRC to organize, repair, and
transfer part of the collection. Interns and volunteers, for
lack of permanent staff, perform essential roles in reducing
the arrearage in examining, repairing, logging, compiling
small reels on to uniform size reels, and re-housing. Only a
small portion of the collection is catalogued and indexed.
Searching is difficult for the bulk of the collection because
a great deal is still stored in huge cartons.

Following the archives' own established procedures, it takes
one person to process 50,000 feet each month. At this rate, a
backlog of about 17 work years exists; not an unmanageable
number if two or three staff positions were made available.
In addition, there is an acute equipment shortage with no
backup players and no players for basic formats like Betacam.
Little or no preservation copying has taken place and in most
instances originals must be used for reference. Storage
conditions are also inadequate. Faced with overcrowding and
underfunding, the university must increasingly focus on its
basic educational mission, leaving few resources for
audiovisual archives.

Founded in 1986, the Louis Wolfson Media History Center has
been able to succeed because its frequent educational programs
have promoted public awareness of the value or preserving
local television news and have brought recognition to and
support of the Wolfson Center's work. Established jointly by
the Miami-Dade Public Library and Community College, the
University of Miami, and the Wolfson Foundation, the Center
was set up in 1986 to receive the first transfer of the news
film from WTVJ dated at early as 1949, some three million
feet, the only news film collection to survive in South
Florida. This collection now amounts to more than ten million
feet in addition to the other Florida-related collections
donated to the center by a variety of donors. Also, the Center
records sixty hours a week off-air since the local stations
only keep their broadcasts about one week. Most importantly,
the Center received the transfer of copyright from WTJV, thus
allowing earnings from the sale of stock footage to be used to
fund preservation and other archival activities.

The Center has a fairly active stock footage sales program
that attracts research requests worldwide. The collection
richly documents the entire transformation of Miami and South
Florida, profoundly influenced by the consequences of the
Cuban Revolution. The impact of the Bay of Pigs invasion in
1961 and the Missile Crisis of 1962 on Floridians is shown.
But the value does not have to relate to compelling national
topics to be important to the state or locality. The
collection shows the ethnic transformation of the region with
its new human dynamics and interrelationships. In recognition
of the importance of the Center's work the Florida legislature
gave it an official designation in 1989 as a statewide
repository for film and television materials relating to the
history of Florida.

Nicely situated in the Miami-Dade Public Library, which covers
overhead costs, the Center emphasizes public outreach and
education. The Center conducts numerous seminars and
screenings each year, often inviting guest television
producers. Among the seminars are, "Historical Images: Ethnic
Diversity in Miami," "Eyewitness Television: Moving Archives
and Regional History,: "Eyewitness Television: The Cuban
Missile Crisis," "Eyewitness Television: 1968,"and Witness to
History: with Congressman Dante Fascell"; the latter,
conducted on the occasion of Fascell's retirement presented
issues, events, and legislation that related to Fascell's
career, 1954-1993, as reflected in the collection. In
addition, there have been numerous retrospective screenings
and film and television seminars connected with the Miami
International Film Festival, all of which have increased
public awareness.

Elizabeth Drew, born and raised in South Florida, who has
produced a number of award- winning documentaries for public
television, spoke at one Wolfson seminar:

The Wolfson Center's facility at the Miami-Dade Public Library
may not look anything like Jules Verne's time machine, but
it's much better. Real pictures of what life was like from
all kinds of sources, all kinds of people, all kinds of
perspectives. And that is pure gold to historians and to
filmmakers like me and really to all of us. Because it's a way
of preserving our stories, the place where the raw materials
of history are kept safe for the future, visions of the
Florida community not only for us and our children, but for
everyone everywhere....

The Wolfson Center has made good progress in
cleaning repairing, splicing and copying its film to
3/4-inch and 1/2-inch tapes. Still the Center lacks
storage space, equipment, and staff to accomplish
some of its major objectives. Nevertheless, the
historical value of the holdings combined with
public visibility in an educational context has
given the Center useful leverage for obtaining
grants from state, local, and national sources.

General Assessment

For most local television news footage from the late 1940's to
the 1970's it is already too late to do anything. Programs
were just not recorded and millions of feet of film clips and
outtakes were destroyed. Television stations still erase and
recycle their video cassettes. Extant collections scattered
around the nation in public archives are in a kind of hold
pattern. While they may not be destroyed, it is far from
certain by any means that they will be preserved. A
consistent refrain from the archival community points to a
uniformity of needs for greater operational resources. Without
sufficient resources (staff, supplies, equipment, facilities)
the local television archives cannot hope to accomplish even
rudimentary preservation steps. Acetate film will succumb to
vinegar syndrome, color film will fade, and originals will
deteriorate from abusive handling. Inexorably a unique record
of contemporary American history will be lost forever.

The states, localities, and regions, must take primary
responsibility for contributing the resources that document
their own history. However, local news television projects
that have broad positive results (such as establishing model
programs that can be shared with other archives, encourage
consistent procedures, or encourage sharing of information for
the benefit of a wider archival or educational community) are
also appropriate for funding at a national level. Further,
local archives should negotiate for the transfer of copyright
before accepting television news collections, perhaps even re-
opening negotiations on past transactions. Archives should
seek donations of equipment from stations, and while it may be
too late to seek the donation of film equipment, video
players/recorders and ancillary equipment may be available
from time to time.

The idea of a moratorium on further destruction proposed by
the National Center for Film and Video Preservation should be
re-introduced, specifically aimed at commercial television
stations and conveyed through the National Association of
Broadcasters. These stations should be encouraged to seek the
cooperation of local archives to discuss donations or
transfers. In addition, in view of the unconscionable practice
of recycling news tapes, local archives should be encouraged
to set up off-air taping programs of news programs as
permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976.

CHAPTER FIVE:

VIDEO ART AND INDEPENDENT VIDEO
VIDEO ART AND INDEPENDENT VIDEO

Introduction

So far this discussion has addressed the preservation of
television and video materials in terms of established or
mainstream media. Yet another universe of culturally and
historically significant videotape exists on the fringes of
established broadcast media where preservation is the most
difficult to accomplish. To be specific, the works of video
artists and independent video producers face a precarious
existence. Researchers find it difficult to determine what
was produced and what still exists. Many of the earliest
tapes have already decayed.

Important video collections, maintained on the east and west
coasts and in such cities as New Orleans, Chicago, and
Minneapolis, are held by museums, libraries, media centers,
college audiovisual departments, nonprofit distribution
outlets, community organizations, and production units;
individual titles are held by original producers or artists in
closets, basements, and other unsuitable places. Many titles
are located in collections in New York state as a result of
the New York State Council on the Arts's early interest in the
development of video as an art form beginning as early as
1969 and 1970. By the 1980's NYSCA, joined by other funders,
was supporting over 80 organizations involved with
video.(107) Few of these productions have found their way to
traditional archives. Virtually none have been registered for
copyright, and consequently the Library of Congress has had
little opportunity to acquire them.

The Experimental Television Center, whose collection shows
contemporary technology-based art practices since 1969,
confronts problems symptomatic of a larger video culture.
Their staff has observed severe sticking on open-reel tapes,
which are gummy, jam in players, and cause heads to clog.
Playback equipment for obsolete formats is difficult to
maintain and almost impossible to repair. Similar problems
have been observed with 3/4-inch U-matic tapes recorded only
10-15 years ago. The record of the Center's past is
inextricably linked to the future of 1/2-inch open-reel tape,
a medium on verge of total extinction.

Born out of the social and political turmoil of the 1960's,
these video works were among the first tangible artistic and
documentary productions made with Sony's lightweight portable
video system known as the "port-a-pack," originally marketed
for the consumer but adopted by artists and activists. In
contrast to the networks whose large video cameras were
tethered like umbilical cords to relatively immobile 2-inch
videotape recorders in studios or equipment trucks, artists
and activists adopted port-a-packs as a new means of
documentation and expression. With unencumbered mobility,
they were free to experiment, to explore new relationships
between light, space, and objects, still or in motion, and
outward and inner personal experiences. Others, more focused
on their own political and social environments, chose to
document aspects of society they perceived were rarely treated
by the mainstream media or which needed to be presented in a
different perspective, and thus they challenged the often
monolithic world of network television. They found outlets in
community centers, libraries, college campuses, public access
channels, and public television. Video as original art and
video as social and political commentary were two identifiable
trends of production, occasionally overlapping in style and
content. According to one assessment,

The collections reflect a unique period in the American social
history, where the boundaries between art and community
development were blurred; in many cases artists became
community activists and activists experimented with creative
uses of the new medium of video to interact with and energize
community members.(108)

Many programs, originated by experimental television
workshops, were carried out in conjunction with public
television; some were aired on public television; others were
synthesized for network television and, arguably, influenced
networks' future production in content and style. Nonetheless,
their enduring significance is not so much their innovative
use of a new communications technology as it is their rich
documentation of an era that goes well beyond the broadcast
media's then-prevailing attitudes and concerns.(109) Because
these genres are not as well known as the broadcast media,
some review of their production may provide helpful background
information.

Two movements emerged out of independent video; one had a kind
of engag‚ confrontational style and the other represented a
process of self-discovery in which communities could identify
for themselves the underlying dynamics that militated against
social change and economic improvement in their lives. What
the movements both had in common was their ability to make
television transcend the limitations of mere entertainment. As
Deirdre Boyle has observed,

Hundred of hours of documentary tapes were shot by
underground groups, tapes on New Left polemics and
the drama of political confrontation as well as
video erotica. Video offered an opportunity to
challenge the boob tube's authority, to replace
television's often negative images of youthful
protest and rebellion with the counterculture's own
values and televised reality.

TV/TV covered the 1972 Democratic and Republican Conventions
with port-a-packs producing documentaries that had a sense of
irreverence and verve. Downtown Community Television (DCTV)
produced programs on social issues at the local level like
The Police Tapes (1976) and occasionally on international
ones, like Cuba: The People (1974).(110) Started in 1986,
Deep Dish Television, the nation's first grassroots satellite
television network, downlinks to over 300 public access
stations and some PBS stations. Given broadcast media's
emphasis on New York and Los Angeles, one of the Deep Dish's
aims is to cover other parts of the country, for example,
Native Americans and Chicanos in the southwest. The Peoples
Video Theater and the April Video Co-op are still other
examples. Paper Tiger produces critiques of mainstream media
which are shown on public access channels and universities;
for example, they produced programs that were critical of the
television news coverage of the Gulf War. Many of these groups
participate in an organization called the Alliance for
Community Media.

Independent video includes community video, an innovative
genre used to assist in the ameliorating the lives of people
who lived in poverty and were victims of racial
discrimination. During the 1960's and 1970's community video
appeared all over the United States modelled on Canada's
"Challenge for Change" project which employed film and video
to involve communities in their economic and social
development. In the United States, the Office of Economic
Opportunity, a federal agency, sponsored film and video
projects aimed at urban and rural groups, prompting them to
speak on and off camera in dialogues on poverty and racism in
their own communities.(111) The tapes were shown to the same
groups to prompt further discussion and they were used in
other communities.

As another example, Broadside TV originated local cable
programming produced by community video activists in
Appalachia during the 1970's. As Boyle has observed, "they
helped extend the concept of oral history to video and gave
isolated people living in the hills and hollows of Appalachia
a tool to confront strip miners, state legislators, and future
generations."(112)

Community-based video production grew out of these democratic
traditions and the idea was a free speech of equal
opportunity, of active participation in government and
government responsiveness to local needs that are so vital.
When artists and community producers picked up the first open
reel half-inch video port-a-packs in the late sixties, the
relationship of regular ordinary folks to the
telecommunications industry changed dramatically.(113)

As far as can be determined, no comprehensive effort has been
made to list, catalog, or document let alone preserve this
remarkable record of the use of video as a two-way street of
communications, especially for the era of the Vietnam war when
many Americans raised fundamental questions about the
credibility of our institutions and the direction of our
social policies. Tragically, for lack of preservation funding,
the remaining audiovisual evidence hangs on the edge of the
abyss.

Advocates of video art look with envy at the programs
established for film preservation, an indication of their
impoverished state of funding.(114) Many early works, 1965-
1975, have been lost or left to decay.(115) With more and
more frequency, debates about the origin, character, form, and
meaning of video art are becoming theoretical and abstract,
because of a nationwide inability to identify sources, consult
original materials, and make them available to a wider public.

The preservation of video art faces severe difficulties. For
example, multiple or multi-channel video has been described
more like a work of environmental or light sculpture that must
be "installed" by the artist because it often requires
several cameras, monitors, and players that interact with
objects and viewers. Arguably, no two installations can ever
be alike, and the task of fixing this artistic experience may
be unattainable. Video art works consisting of single channel
or conventional videotape have their own set of typical
preservation problems, among them the critical importance of
working from an original in an era of analog recording now in
decline.

Fortunately, under MoMA's video art acquisition requirements,
the museum obtains three copies: a submaster, 3/4-inch and
later 1-inch (the artist retains the original), an exhibition
copy, and a study copy. MoMA has about 800 titles in its video
art collection, and it too has been a beneficiary of NYSCA.
MoMA has had some success in raising preservation money from
exhibition of video art. Like film preservation, MoMA is a
leader in this field, but few other organizations are in a
position to emulate their policies without additional funding.

Established 25 years ago, Electronic Arts Intermix has a
library of about 2,000 titles representing work by over 200
artists. EAI is primarily a distribution center but tries to
transfer early tapes upon request. Among its most frequent
requestors are curators, writers, and artists who would not,
presumably, support higher fees even for EIA's preservation
activities.

One exceptional bright spot in this litany of generally
underfunded arts projects is the Andy Warhol Preservation
Project, which receives the support of the Warhol Estate and
Foundation. When he died in 1987, the artist Warhol left some
1,000 hours of videotapes which he and his associates had made
since 1965, including about 100 hours of port-a-pack video, 1-
inch helical, 3/4-inch, and Betacam. The Estate and Foundation
supported the copying of the tapes primarily to 1-inch Type C
and 3/4-inch. Provisions have also been made for cataloging.

The earliest video art works were recorded on the 1/2-inch
open-reel format, a far less stable videotape than anything
used by the networks.(116) Accelerated by generally poor
storage conditions, videotapes are decaying due to fundamental
deficiencies in the product's engineering--after all, it was
only designed for consumers--to the destruction of video
heads, and to the scarcity of playback equipment last
manufactured more than twenty years ago. As a group, these
collections and the organizations that work with them are more
concerned with salvaging 1/2-inch open-reel videotape than any
other groups or organizations.(117)

A Media Alliance grant application submitted to NEH for funds
to catalog this video genre was rejected in 1995 and in 1996.
As the grant points out, many media arts groups are unfamiliar
with professional cataloging practices and lack computers and
training facilities, making the development of shared data
fairly difficult.

"Within the media arts field we are acutely aware that
access to most media arts collections is extremely
limited, and in some cases impossible. Outside the
catalogs of a few distributors, organizational and funder
records, and a loose network of contacts within the
field, there is no way to locate early works."(118)

Fortunately several organizations have been aided by
cataloging support from the American Film Institute's National
Center for Film and Video Preservation and have entered their
descriptions into the NAMID MARC-compatible database
maintained by the Center. Notwithstanding, an overall
intellectual framework based on cataloging is sorely lacking.
It is difficult for researchers to ascertain what was made and
what may still exist on a nationwide basis.

The interests of the diverse organizations that maintain
collections of these videotapes have been well served by arts
advocacy groups such as the Media Alliance in New York and
the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture in Oakland,
and also through the production facilities and technical
assistance of the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco.
In 1991 Media Alliance held a Video Preservation Symposium
which brought together more than 60 representatives of arts
and independent video groups, who were given an overview of
problems of preserving early videotapes.(119) BAVAC held a
similar conference in March 1996 as a way of advocating and
advancing preservation efforts. BAVAC, though primarily a
production center for nonprofit organizations, has performed
low-cost transfer work for such groups as the Minnesota
Historical Society, the Gay and Lesbian Archive of the San
Francisco Public Library, the Video Data Bank, and Electronic
Arts Intermix.

In addition to those already mentioned, there are important
collections held at the Long Beach Museum, Video Free America,
University Community Video, Art Institute of Chicago's Video
Data Bank (120), Appalachian Archives, New Orleans Video
Access Center, Media Bus, Videofreex, Global Village, and the
Kitchen, Buffalo's Media Study Center, among others.

Assessment

These video materials represent a unique body of work, "a
major investment of both public and private funds into a
historical and cultural legacy that unfortunately remains
largely out of reach of both scholars and the public."(121)
There appears to be little awareness of their value outside
specialized arts circles. Many of the organizations having
custody of these materials lack preservation expertise,
appropriate facilities, and even the staff to catalog or
describe them.

Media arts tend to be the most underfunded of all the arts,
and any available funds usually go to production and not
preservation, a state of affairs that closely parallels the
situation in public broadcasting. Current and proposed cuts in
NEA's grant allocations are perceived as very threatening to
video art, not only to its past record as a genuine art
movement but also to its future.

None of the community video organizations have funding to
archive their programs, and no major nationally oriented
repository has collected them. However, it is easy to see that
in the future these programs will take on comparable
historical importance to the films from the 1930's made by the
labor activists of the Film and Photo League now housed in the
Museum of Modern Art. Only the videotapes in current
distribution have a chance of survival. This gap will distort
the history of several decades.

The persons who produce or work with these materials are
uncompromising advocates of the historical and cultural value
these collections represent, such as Robert Haller of
Anthology Archives:

Decades from now the videotapes made by independent and
experimental artists will be at least important if not more so
as the product made by the networks and see by millions.
Though the audience for independents is small, they speak with
an uncompromised authenticity less frequently found in the
mass media.(122)

Barbara London of MoMA has described video art as the "true
art of the 20th century":
Video is a major art of our time. There are a significant
number of international artists who have concentrated on video
and installation throughout their distinguished careers. They
have developed distinctive themes and stylistic
vocabularies.(123) Video art has already merged with
computer art and through digital imagery will no doubt emerge
in other forms and permutations.

The needs of the independent media arts community merit an on-
going task force devoted to preservation and access issues, a
task force linking the expertise of local groups with that of
nationally recognized centers for video preservation. One
place to begin is to conduct a nationwide survey to determine
where and how these collections are stored and whether
collaborative strategies are possible. In addition, it is
necessary to conserve, catalog, and bring these works to the
attention of a wider public and to scholars and educators.
Public television, cable television, and other broadcast
outlets should be explored for this purpose.

Collaborative preservation efforts are needed such as the
shared use of storage facilities, technical expertise, and
access to proper equipment. Because it may not always be
possible to place these collections in major repositories,
shared or regional storage facilities may be more appropriate.
As a nonprofit production center, BAVAC has re-formatted some
early tapes at relatively low cost to other nonprofit groups,
but more nonprofit facilities, services, and equipment are
needed.

CHAPTER SIX:

ACCESS

A. Educational Value

By passing the American Television and Radio Archives Act,
Congress demonstrated that it recognized the research and
educational value of broadcast programming and therefore
mandated the Library of Congress "to preserve a permanent
record of the television and radio programs which are the
heritage of the people of the United States and to provide
access to such programs to historians and scholars without
encouraging or causing copyright right infringement." Further,
defining this area of interest very broadly, Congress included
programs of present or potential public or cultural interest,
historical significance, cognitive value or otherwise worthy
of preservation. The mandate included published and
unpublished works, which, in terms, of television have their
own meanings.(124) Congress also defined its interests to
include television programming in other countries as
categories appropriate for preservation in the Library of
Congress.

The law's origin was based, in part, on an increased
recognition of the growing importance of television in
contemporary American society and, that to achieve an
understanding of our civilization in any scholarly manner, it
would be necessary to have access to past television
programming. To be sure, the history of television as a
discipline is a legitimate academic area of inquiry, but
Congress also envisaged multidisciplinary values, in
safeguarding and preserving the television heritage; in
history, political science, cultural studies, sociology,
ethnography, and so on almost without limit. Television has
become the primary form of entertainment and information. By
1960 almost 90% of the public had a television set and watched
about five hours each day.(125) Since the early 1970's
trends in university curriculum and research and publishing
interests have more than justified Congress's expectation.

Television programs used as part of classroom instruction
allow teachers to introduce many aspects of modern American
history and a wide range of social issues. All television
subjects have some educational value. "It is the total
television experience," as media historian Tom Cripps
observed, "that will teach our offspring what our culture was
like."(126) Whether its politics, gender relations, racial
and ethnic issues, or national psychoses or anxieties, all
genres have something worthy of academic analysis. Rather than
dismiss it as a vast wasteland, Thomas Doherty observed that
television shapes our imagination and colors our existence; it
reflects the values Americans esteem and the values by which
they live; and even the leaders we elect are transmitted and
mediated by television.

"But in tracing a half century of American life via
television, I--and most of my students, I really believe--
found the material rich, complex, and demanding: the death of
presidents, the immediacy of war, the constitution in action.
The chronology alone tracks a whole range of cultural
transformations, many impossible to imagine without the
influence--salutary and baleful--of television. Would the
civil rights movement have finally penetrated the American
conscience without television? Would crime and illegitimacy
have exploded without the commercial drumbeat of self-
gratification and instant gratification? Surely, these are
subjects and questions to be pondered in an undergraduate
education."(127)

One witness compared the study of television to the value of
the 19th-century American novel in a different historical
context. "To talk about politics business, and domestic
life," Michael Curtin argued, "to talk about these and many
other issues in the latter half of this century without making
reference to television is to delude oneself with the notion
that television doesn't really matter because it's just cheap
entertainment. On the contrary, a growing number of prominent
scholars would now suggest that inscribed in these texts are
the aspirations, fantasies, and power relations of this
society. They are as much a part of our social and cultural
heritage as the billions of printed pages in archives and
research libraries across the country."(128)

Numerous scholars have been acutely interested in the role
television plays in defining social relationships among
groups, with local communities and national leaders, and the
world at large. "These interests," stated Lynn Spigel,
"necessitate the preservation of our televisual past as a
source of understanding a major component of the nation's
history and life."(129) Without the preservation of
television and video materials, said Janet Bergstrom,
representing the thousand-member Society of Cinema Studies
(SCS), "we would be prevented from carrying out our primary
mission as educators and researchers. Our academic field,
which is central to charting the history and culture of the
United States, would cease to exist."(130)

Researchers generally favor broad and comprehensive collection
policies. However well intentioned, artful selections preclude
research possibilities rather than facilitate them. Preserving
a few popular hits, special episodes of series, highlights,
and anthologies of programs tend to dictate research trends to
the next generation. Selections cannot, they argue,
accommodate the multidisciplinary interests of researchers and
scholars. As described by Spigel, scholars place significant
emphasis on the close analysis of television series as a way
to understand how these series have both shaped and been
shaped by larger, social economic, cultural, and artistic
trends." They need to understand the rhetorical and aesthetic
forms, and in order to do this entire series are
necessary.(131) John Caldwell argued that skewed samples
falsely "totalized" the early 1950's as a "golden age" of live
anthology drama when Hollywood telefilms were just as
important from the start.(132)

Scholars who impart their knowledge and understanding to their
students also influence future television production.
Producers and writers, Caldwell has observed, use insights
from television and cultural studies because they have
reviewed and analyzed them at universities. Good studies,
therefore, are in the production industry's interest.(133)

Television News and Documentaries

Television news and documentaries are also an important part
of this audiovisual legacy. Scholars continually debate the
role of television network news in American life and politics.
The number of viewers for evening news for all three networks
in 1980 was 56 million, contrasting with a steady decline in
newspaper circulation. The popularity of programs like Sixty
Minutes and other television magazines attest to television's
influence in the news arena. Would the civil rights movement
and the peace movement against the Vietnam War have entered so
many American lives without television news? Perhaps, but
certainly not as fast and as not as dramatically and
persuasively, day after day, with images and words that only
television can convey. Was television news just a neutral
observer in these momentous changes in American political and
social attitudes or did it act as a catalyst hastening events
and steering them toward an underlying agenda consistent with
the political beliefs of the broadcasters themselves? As
media historian Erik Barnouw has suggested, television news
has been used by many different persons and groups for
different reasons: "Thus television news is seldom a record of
events that would in any case have happened. It is rather the
dramaturgy of current history, in which many, with diverse
motives collaborate."(134) It is easy to predict that
scholars will continually debate the role of television news
coverage in areas that have been critical in our collective
history such as international conflicts, presidential election
campaigns, gender, race, poverty, crime, and the
environment.(135)

If the visual record does not survive, such debates can only
lead to frustration. The Federal Communications Commission
never required an audiovisual or written record of television
news broadcasts, only logs, until 1984 (when even this modest
requirement was removed). Speaking to the National Association
of Broadcasters on April 1, 1968, President Johnson said,

Unlike the printed media, television writes on the wind.
There is no accumulated record which the historian can
examine later with 20-20 vision of hindsight, asking
questions: "How fair was he tonight? How impartial was he
today? How honest was he all along?(136)

The Copyright Act of 1976 provided a persuasive incentive for
the networks to record and retain fixed copies of their
newscasts, because federal copyright protection extends only
to works fixed in a tangible medium of expression, e.g.,
videotape. However, the law does not require that the
videotape be preserved to enjoy copyright protection.(137)
Since the mid-seventies the networks have tended to record and
retain copies of newscasts. As part of the Copyright Act, the
American Television and Radio Archives (ATRA) legislation
authorized the Library of Congress to record off-air regularly
scheduled newscasts and on-the-spot coverage of news events.
The Television News Archive of Vanderbilt University has
worked cooperatively with the Library to help fulfill ATRA's
mandate.

Systematic retention of televised network news broadcasts did
not begin until August 1968 when Vanderbilt University,
encouraged by Paul Simpson, a Nashville area businessman and
alumnus, established the Television News Archive. As an acute
observer of American politics, Simpson was nothing short of
outraged by the public's inability to review and scrutinize
television news coverage of the bitterly contested
presidential election campaign of 1968. The networks
themselves did not keep a videotape record of their nightly
news broadcasts until well into the 1970's when the advent of
3/4-inch U-matic video cassettes made it cost-effective to do
so. Since the networks are not required by law to retain
audiovisual copies, it is fair to ask whether they will in
fact maintain and re-format some of the early cassettes which
are now almost twenty years old and well past their normal
life expectancy. Nor are the networks required to register
their programs for copyright although CBS and ABC have done so
since the 1970s, depositing U-matic cassettes at the Library
of Congress. In addition since 1976 CBS News has deposited as
a gift to the National Archives 3/4-inch copies of its hard
news and special events coverage.

Like the 35mm theatrical newsreels before them, television
news broadcasts have many shortcomings as scholars are wont to
point out. The format doesn't exactly lend itself to full
explanations: reports are necessarily superficial, transitory,
and often inaccurate; cause and effect relationships from one
story to another are often elusive. Nevertheless, viewed
collectively as a daily accumulation of audiovisual
information, the news broadcasts constitute a tremendous
record of American history in all its political and social
manifestations.

Local television news represents this same research potential
on a regional scale. As Lisa Wood put it, "People trust and
respect their local news stations for information gathering on
issues that effect them directly. Local stations act as
filters through which Americans get their world and national
news, shape their political opinions, their sense of culture
and their measurement of the quality of life."(138) The
accumulated audiovisual record of local television news
broadcasts, potentially, represents a treasure trove of
information about the history of states, cities, towns, and
regions throughout the United States, including its leaders
and residents, the architecture and look of buildings and
places, crises and disasters, ceremonies and parades, trades
and crafts, and other social phenomena that in their entirety
document the routines and processes of daily life as they have
evolved over the last fifty years. What would be the value of
a comparable visual record from Europe in the Middle Ages or
from the United States in the 19th century?

Regrettably, the preservation of local television news is
precarious. Most of the local television news film libraries,
many of which dated from the late 1940's, were destroyed at
the direction of station managers or owners concerned with
bottom line profits and losses and cost-benefit values. Such
deliberate and willful destruction, arguably, stems from the
failure of the archival and educational communities to create
a sense of awareness of the value of local news film
collections. Fortunately some collections have survived. (See
Chapter 4 for a discussion of local television news archives.)

Public Television

Scholars benefit from the study of commercial television
because of its broad audience appeal and its influence on
political and social life in the United States. Although
historically not as popular, public television deserves
special recognition as a unique record of American arts,
ideas, history, nature, and sciences whose enduring
educational value is magnificently evident.

Among the dramatic works, for example, are the first
television productions of the early plays of Sam Shepard and
Edward Albee recorded for NET's Playhouse and Theater in
America as well as the television debuts of numerous American
actors such as Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, and Kevin Kline.
The long-running series Great Performances is a unique record
of American opera and dramatic works throughout the United
States. Public television broadcasts contain programs about or
performances of America's greatest musical artists: Aaron
Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington,
Itzak Perlman, Beverly Sills, and Kathleen Battle, to name
only a few. The programs also constitute a record of American
dance since the l960's, made with the collaboration of the
choreographers. Many artists, interviewed and recorded on
camera, described the ideas and events that influenced and
shaped their works.
Taken together, the performances and interviews provide an
incredibly rich and comprehensive record of American cultural
life, arguably, at its best.

Past public television also includes coverage of news and
public affairs in the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour and Frontline.
Because their formats are longer than commercial newscasts,
they can report topics in depth and explore relationships and
causes and effects. This is in contrast to network reporting
which can often be cryptic in its brief presentation. Public
television news programs represent a unique record of American
political life for the last 25 years.

Other programs like the American Experience consist of
documentaries that provide a record of American civilization,
its history, institutions, portrayals of life in the United
States, emphasizing ethnic minorities. Many of these
productions represent years of research by determined
documentarians, usually funded by government and foundation
grants and donations, from patrons, friends, and relatives,
and even by second mortgages.

B. Obstacles to Educational Use

From the viewpoint of scholars numerous difficulties make the
use of television materials for research and teaching an
arduous task. These obstacles range from fairly mundane
problems such as not having the right playback equipment to
complex legal questions incorporated in copyright law and
issues of fair use. There are economic, institutional, and
legal obstacles to educational use that do not always arise in
the world of printed materials.

Despite the apparent surfeit of older television programs on
cable broadcast channels like Nick at Nite, SciFi Channel,
Arts and Entertainment, the History Channel, and The Family
Channel, scholars argue that access to older programs is one
of the main problems. Few old television programs are in
distribution via video cassettes. Certainly very few older
news programs are in distribution except as recycled into new
documentaries. The available programs tend to be the popular
hits and not the mundane and ordinary. The public identifies
popular programs with the network that broadcasts them without
realizing that most of the entertainment programs are produced
and owned by major Hollywood studios or independent producers.
Networks do not usually retain file copies if re-broadcast is
not anticipated and return the programs to the producers or
studios that made them. Networks cannot accommodate scholars,
nor can studios or independent producers, who frequently sell
off their rights. Service for scholars just does not fit
within the corporate mission of production or syndication
companies.

Scholars with easy access to cities like Washington, Los
Angeles, and New York, which house the largest television
collections, have a great advantage over those who live in
other parts of the country. The cost of travel for research
and on-site visits has become increasingly prohibitive as the
number of grants has declined. For small colleges not only
travel but the cost of equipment and off-air licenses makes it
difficult for libraries to service research interests. "And
so," concluded Thomas Cripps, who teaches at Morgan State, a
historically black university, "our distance from the
mainstream of American intellectual life remains the subject
of constant struggle."(139)

The scarcity of regional access has increased the demand for
on-line cataloging information available through the Internet
and for the greater circulation of programs through rentals or
inter-library loan. Scholars point to UCLA as a good model
because the television holdings are described in the
university library's database, available on the campus network
and through the Internet.

Due to the generally poor funding situation among the nation's
television archives, scholars often encounter unprocessed
collections that are effectively inaccessible. Lack of
descriptions, unarranged film and videotape materials, and
staff shortages militate against real access. Left
unprocessed, the materials cannot be prioritized for
preservation work, and in the end may inexorably, deteriorate
beyond recovery.

In an era of declining library purchasing power, universities
have more restrictions on purchasing copies of television
footage for classroom use. If a program is not in retail
distribution, the one-time purchase cost of a copy from the
copyright owner is often prohibitive. The proliferation of
educational CD-ROM's, while opening up a number of
possibilities for creating texts and audiovisual files,
together with the expansion of the television industry, has
had the chilling effect of increasing the monetary value of
old television programs.

Scholars realize that archives can't save every television
program. But selections are often incomplete and
unrepresentative. Scholars feel excluded from the selection
process. Critical decisions about what to save are being made
without the benefit of those best equipped to understand
historical and cultural value.

Frame enlargements from television programs intended for
publication in books or articles are always difficult to
obtain. Enlargements are often poor in quality, and the rights
are always uncertain. The problem of frame enlargements from
television film and tape for use in scholarly publications is
no different from the situation described in the Library of
Congress/NFPB national plan for film preservation.(140)
Archives have inconsistent policies about providing
enlargements. To protect themselves against liability,
publishers usually require a copyright authorization. The
resulting fee often exceeds $100 per frame. Scholars, on the
other hand, tend to view the publication of frame enlargements
as "fair use," something akin to citing quotations from
another work. They consider the fees excessive, especially in
the context of academic publications, with limited
circulation. Even when scholars are willing to obtain
clearances, ownership is often difficult to establish for many
older programs and referrals to legal departments in large
corporations result in long delays and excessive minimum
changes.

Access to television news coverage is a difficult case. Past
television news programs are not available like newspapers on
microfilm. The earliest systematic collection of television
news did not begin until August 1968 at Vanderbilt University
and, though it continues to the present, the archives and
distribution program has only started to include some of the
influential CNN daily news broadcasts. CNN and NBC News
broadcasts are not registered for copyright, so not even the
Library of Congress has copies. Some scholars feel that
Vanderbilt's rental costs are high and therefore discourage
scholarly use. Many of Vanderbilt's requests are actually
business-related rather than educational. The networks
themselves do not encourage scholarly research; they are not
set up to accommodate individual researchers. Sometimes they
can cooperate, but it is not their main line of business. To
obtain copies may take as long as six weeks. Union rates are
charged where applicable. One network library contractor
charges hourly research fees. The networks will not sell the
face and voice of a broadcast journalist. Networks will not
sell unedited footage based on any consistent policy, only
what was broadcast. Scholars believe that extensive amounts of
unedited footage and field cassettes are being destroyed
according to corporate criteria that preclude future scholarly
research. Scholars would like the networks to state publicly
that they will preserve these materials.

On the other side, it can be said that the ABC, NBC, and CBS
have done an excellent job in making transcripts available,
and since the mid-1970's ABC and CBS have made 3/4-inch video
cassettes available at the Library of Congress and the
National Archives. ABC News and CNN have made their
descriptive databases partially available on the
Internet.(141) Nonetheless there is no low cost access to
television news and public affairs. David Culbert, editor of
the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, noticed
that he has received few monographs about television news. He
believes that television news has hardly been studied in
comparison to print journalism because of the difficulties of
accessing older programs.(142)

The most recurring theme in the discussion of obstacles
encumbering research and teaching is that of copyright and
fair use of all television programming. Michael Curtin, for
example, said "that in an era when television is the
preeminent mode of popular communication, much of what the
medium circulates is unavailable for legitimate scholarly
scrutiny. It is as if we have blanked out an important part of
our cultural heritage because commercial interest and
copyright concerns had overridden public interest and free
scholarly inquiry."(143)

Scholars believe that the Copyright Act of 1976, including its
provisions for "fair use," are much too restrictive and
effectively thwart and discourage educational use of
television materials. Scholars would like to see all nonprofit
educational use be considered fair use of copyrighted work.
Media producers from public or commercial television, on the
other hand, see education as a large market for many of their
productions whose use must be controlled and licensed through
compensatory fees. The production industry has conceded
little to educators. Fair use standards as defined by a
Negotiating Committee, which worked under the auspices of the
House Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and
Administration of Justice, limit retention of off-air
videotapes made for classroom use to 45 calendar days. Further
retention would require the acquisition or purchase of a
license from the copyright owner or distributor and payment of
requisite fees.(144) Despite the publication of these
guidelines, educators feel the question of fair use is still
unresolved and that current practices are detrimental to
scholarship. Accurate copyright information on older programs
is often difficult to obtain despite good faith efforts. There
is no copyright clearing house for television materials
comparable to ASCAP, which through collective license
arrangements makes it possible to streamline clearance
procedures and payments. Teachers, librarians, audiovisual
technicians, and the university as an institution are working
under threats of litigation.

Scholars have noted that the authority given to the Library of
Congress under the Copyright Act for off-air taping of
programs has been limited to news and noncommercial
broadcasts, to the exclusion of entertainment programs.(145)
This restriction places all other genres off limits, including
documentaries and soft news, which may be acquired only if
they are formally registered for copyright. In addition, owing
to copyright restrictions, the Library of Congress cannot
circulate its television materials. A few other libraries and
archives, especially at regional and local levels, are taking
advantage of the so-called Vanderbilt provision of the
Copyright Act by taping hard news off air. Scholars are
fearful that current restrictions will make it impossible or
difficult to access older programs through the new
technologies.

Research and access to past public television programs are
extremely difficult, primarily limited to programs placed in
commercial distribution via the sale of video cassettes.
Neither the Corporation for Public Broadcasting nor the Public
Broadcasting Service maintains a public research facility.
However, some programs are available at the Library of
Congress and the newly established National Public
Broadcasting Archives.

CHAPTER 7:

CURRENT FUNDING FOR PRESERVATION

CHAPTER SEVEN: PAST AND CURRENT FUNDING

Funding television and video preservation in public archives
has been, in a word, inadequate, though there have been
several important exceptions (noted below). Unlike the former
National Endowment for the Arts/American Film Institute "pass
through" program devoted exclusively for film preservation, no
clear pattern has emerged for television and video. However
insufficient film preservation funding may appear, television
archivists look with envy at the past NEA/AFI preservation
program, The Film Foundation, and other recent initiatives to
preserve American film.

Federal funds have been awarded to libraries and archives for
television projects, but there has been little or no
coordination and communication among funding agencies; and
thus areas of interest and agreements on responsibility remain
vague.

Federal agencies awarded funding to public archives primarily
to improve access. The NHPRC contributed a total of
approximately $500,000 in the past decade to ten local
television news archives. The NEH awarded $220,000 to
Vanderbilt University's Television News Archive. The
Department of Education awarded $750,000 over nine years to
the Political Commercial Archive of the University of Oklahoma
under the Higher Education Act of 1965. The J. Paul Leonard
Library of San Francisco State University received $50,000 for
the preservation of local television news under the Library
Construction and Services Act. The Library of Congress has
received about $500,000 from Congress each year since 1978 to
fund ATRA activities.

In the private sector, only the Museum of Television and Radio
in New York, which emphasizes research and public education
about the American broadcast heritage, has had an outstanding
record of success for raising funds to support its activities
and to achieve its long-range objectives, including the
opening of a second museum site in Los Angeles. The Museum
derives its income from an endowment, individual donations,
donations at admission, and in-kind contributions from
manufacturers. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
contributes $50,000 each year to the Museum for cataloging and
preservation work on public broadcasting materials. Around
the country other foundations, corporations, and individuals
have provided some support to local television news
collections. For example, the Louis Wolfson II Foundation
established the Wolfson Media History Center in Miami for the
preservation of local television news (WTVJ).

One of the major problems has been the inability of public
archives having custody of television and video materials to
compete for funding on a fair and equitable basis with other
audiovisual preservation projects. Foundations have rejected
many grant applications because of the perceived inadequacy of
videotape as a preservation medium. Projects proposing film-
to-tape or tape-to-tape transfers have also been
categorically rejected or given low priority. Foundations can
hardly be faulted for their past reactions because public
archives had yet to establish the principles for video
preservation.

Several state councils on the arts have been vital sources for
funding independent television production, public television,
and video artists. In recent years, their budgets have
generally been cut or have stagnated. Only limited funds have
been made available for re-formatting the early work of their
grantees, now endangered by format obsolescence or videotape
deterioration.

Lack of official state recognition has weakened local and
regional funding efforts for most local television and video
archives. Preservation programs that are part of state
universities have only implicit recognition. Some archival
programs are part of the state governments, and some
legislatures have recognized the statewide responsibility of
local television archives. Still others have no recognition
for the efforts of archives to preserve television or video
materials that are highly relevant to state and local history.

No single arrangement can best describe how public archives
holding television or video collections receive their funding.
In the worst case, often too typical, television materials are
accessioned without any additional resources in sight. Some
public archives have received the underlying rights and title
along with the physical materials, thus offering a potential
source of income through stock footage license fees. At least
one model arrangement has been identified between a public
archives and a broadcaster: Public Affairs Video Archives
(PAVA) and C-SPAN (see pp. 79). Even more encouraging is the
success of the Museum of Television and Radio.

CHAPTER EIGHT: A NATIONAL PLAN

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR

SAFEGUARDING AND PRESERVING THE

AMERICAN TELEVISION AND VIDEO HERITAGE

A National Plan: Recommendations for Safeguarding and
Preserving

the American Television and Video Heritage

Introduction

The American television and video heritage is a heritage at
risk. Early television was broadcast live, kinescope copies
were used selectively, other programs were deliberately
destroyed, and tapes were erased and recycled, still
unfortunately the frequent practice in the production of
local television news. Film and videotape vulnerability to
deterioration further imperils this rich heritage, and
videotape recordings may be lost to posterity if archival
programs do not address format obsolescence.

That this heritage is one worth preserving has been a major
theme of this report. The passage of the American Television
and Radio Archives Act as part of the Copyright Act of 1976
officially recognized the historical and cultural value of
American broadcasting materials as a key to understanding our
civilization. Educators who participated in the hearings
eloquently and convincingly defined these values in terms of
their own curriculum, research and writing. Moreover, every
group or committee that has ever examined the role of
television news in American political and social processes--so
conspicuous during the 1996 presidential campaign--has never
failed to recognize the critical importance of saving all news
as aired. Our heritage would be diminished if the vast record
of our history and culture, above all in the performing arts
as shown on public television, were allowed to vanish. So too,
the works of video art that have enhanced our museums and
galleries, expanding our imagination and sensibility, and the
independent video productions that have taught Americans to
see their lives from a different point of view. Inaction will
eventually take its toll.

Appropriately, the final part of this report contains
recommendations that form an action plan in the following
critical areas: preservation, access, funding, and public
awareness. While the Library of Congress will exercise strong
leadership in these areas, the plan can succeed only with the
active participation of public and corporate archives
throughout the United States and the organizations they
represent. The participation of the educational community,
professional associations, and members of the industry is also
needed for continuing guidance and for ensuring that
initiatives to preserve American television and video reflect
a broad consensus of views and interests similar to the
process that produced this report.

This report marks only the beginning of a process to safeguard
and preserve the American television and video heritage.
Developing an implementation plan is the next crucial step, a
plan that will assign lead responsibility for each
recommendation to individuals, institutions and organizations.
The Library of Congress will do this after it has had an
opportunity to ascertain the interests and willingness of
other institutions and organizations to join in a partnership
to preserve this heritage and to remove as many obstacles to
access as practicable within the guidelines of copyright law.

A. DEFINING THE PRESERVATION OF TELEVISION AND VIDEO
MATERIALS

RECOMMENDATIONS

GENERAL

The American television and video heritage is now at a
crossroads. One direction leads toward catastrophic losses of
film and videotape, with the likely exception of studio and
network programs in corporate archives that can be recycled
for new income. Another direction leads toward the managed
preservation of extant television and video materials that
bear an important relationship to American history and culture
regardless of their reuse potential or monetary value.
Preserving this heritage is enormously complicated by the
sheer size of the American television and video industries,
the explosive growth of cable broadcasting, the decentralized
and fragmentary nature of broadcasting in the United States,
and its competitiveness. Further, important parts of the
American television heritage are already divided among public
archives, libraries, historical societies, museums,
universities, and a variety of other nonprofit institutions,
all seeking preservation funding from limited sources.

Although this report tries to identify film and videotape as
separate preservation activities in the history of television
and video, in the future this separation will become more
artificial and abstract, as television breaks down the
boundaries, indeed as communications technology merges all
forms of information into one giant bitstream like the
Internet.

1. All organizations having custody of American television
and video materials, whether private or public bodies, should
recognize their responsibilities for preserving a part of the
historical and cultural heritage.

The national collection of television and video materials is
not a single collection in one institution but a vast network
of audiovisual holdings dispersed in public and corporate
archives throughout the United States. Television and video
preservation is, therefore, necessarily a shared
responsibility. These holdings should be held in trust for
the American people, for the research community and the
general public, who treasure the unique audiovisual dimension
of television and its significance in American history, art,
and culture. The custodians of the national collection should
share a common bond in 1) recognizing their responsibilities
under this trust and 2) their cooperative and separate efforts
to safeguard and preserve television and video for the use and
enjoyment of future generations.

2. Under the concept of shared responsibility, archives
should carefully consider the preservation status of materials
in other archives before embarking on costly restoration or
re-formatting programs. For example, public archives should
evaluate the uniqueness of their materials before beginning
these costly programs. Duplication to allow or improve access,
however, may be an over-riding consideration. This concept
cannot succeed without open communications between public and
corporate archives.

Providing for the preservation of American television and
video is the responsibility of public and corporate archives,
which, despite their diversity in mission and purpose, need to
cooperate with one another to ensure that their preservation
efforts are complementary and that no significant portion of
our television and video heritage is in danger of destruction
or loss. This cooperation should be based upon the publicly
stated commitments of corporate archives to safeguard and
preserve television materials they created or acquired and on
the public archives' commitment to fulfill their own missions
of preservation and access. To achieve these goals corporate
and public archives should communicate openly and frequently
about their holdings and on-going preservation programs. Given
this framework of cooperation, public archives can direct
their preservation efforts to other important preservation
priorities, thus avoiding redundant and costly duplication.

PART ONE: TELEVISION FILM

Film-based materials represent an integral part of the
American television heritage because producers frequently used
35mm and 16mm film to originate or record telefeatures,
miniseries, weekly comedies and dramas, documentaries, and
other kinds of programs. In reality, the holdings of public
and corporate archives consist of film and videotape,
especially those archives whose holdings date from the
earliest days of television history when selected programs
were recorded on 16mm kinescopes. The networks, for example,
hold several hundred million feet of news and documentary
film, and local television news archives hold over one hundred
million feet nationwide. As photographic records, these films
are vulnerable to deterioration from elevated levels of
storage temperatures, relative humidity, and pollutant gases
not to mention physical abuse. In recognition of the extensive
losses that have already taken place, the Library of Congress
published a film preservation study in 1993: Film Preservation
1993: A Study of the Current State of American Film
Preservation, Volume 1, Report, and one year later, Redefining
Film Preservation: A National Plan: Recommendations of the
Library of Congress in consultation with the National Film
Preservation Board. The preservation recommendations and
guidance in this report and the national plan are equally
pertinent to television film, particularly with respect to the
need for improved storage conditions. The national plan for
film described seven recommendations relating to preservation
that are equally germane to the preservation of television and
video.

Recommendation 3.1: Storage
Establish the improvement of storage conditions as the
cornerstone of preservation policy and an integral part
of federal funding programs.
Recommendation 3.2: Saving Original Film
Recognize the importance of saving the original film,
even after copying, unless it has deteriorated beyond any
use.
Recommendation 3.3: Archival Laboratory Copying
Convene a working group to screen and discuss archival-
quality laboratory duplication work.
Recommendation 3.4: Technical Guidelines
Encourage development and acceptance of standardized
technical guidelines for the laboratory duplication of
black-and-white and color film of archival quality.
Recommendation 3.5: Substitutes for Harmful Chemicals
Encourage the development of substitutes for
environmentally dangerous chemicals vital for film
preservation.
Recommendation 3.6: Sharing Preservation Information
Lay the groundwork for sharing information on the
surviving preservation elements.
Recommendation 3.7: Digital Preservation
Encourage a "two-path" approach that (1) actively
explores the preservation potential of digital and other
copying technologies while also remembering that (2) it
remains essential to save original films for as long as
possible.

Television archives will eventually experience extensive film
losses due to deterioration, exacerbated by a history of poor
storage conditions. Foremost as a problem is "vinegar
syndrome," a chemical process that releases acetic acid and
other gases, slowly causing utter destruction of base and
image. Color fading is the other major source of
deterioration, leaving images a washed-out or pale magenta
version of their original color values. Improved storage
conditions generally consisting of cooler temperatures and
drier air are effective against chemical deterioration in
film. Detailed storage specifications for the storage of
black-and-white and color film may be found in ANSI, IT9.11-
1991, Processed Safety Photographic Film-Storage, though many
archives have chosen even cooler conditions. The Image
Permanence Institute provides guidance for plotting life
expectancies of acetate film (James M. Reilly, The IPI Storage
Guide for Acetate Film (Image Permanence Institute: Rochester,
1993).

1. Recognize the importance of saving the original film even
after copying unless it has deteriorated beyond any use.

There is a temptation to discard the original film after its
has been transferred to videotape. If nothing else, the
original should be viewed as a security copy to be set aside,
in a different location, as insurance against damage to or
loss of the new copies. In addition, the original film may
have some intrinsic value, an associated or commemorative
value derived from its provenance. But probably the most
important reasons for keeping the original film after copying
are its image resolution and life expectancy compared to that
of videotape. Even copying film to film produces generational
loss. The best film-to-tape transfers made on modern-day
scanners, though quite acceptable for broadcasting, capture
less than half the resolution of 16mm film. Future
installation of advanced television systems will create a need
to transfer film images at much higher levels of resolution.
Destruction of the original film will preclude this
possibility.

2. Deaccessioning of original film by public or corporate
archives should be made in consultation with the archival
community.

This recommendation is offered as an alternative to outright
disposal. Consultations will help to ascertain the interests
of other archives in taking custody of deaccessioned films,
under a deposit agreement or instrument of gift.

3. Monitor the chemical stability of the following films and
schedule them for copying as quickly as resources permit:
A. Reversal film, especially early color reversal film
used for for television news and film with composite magnetic
stripe sound tracks.
B. Poorly developed film, characterized by staining from
excessive amounts of residual hypo (sodium thiosulfate) left
on the film's surface during hasty processing.

Television news and documentary film, especially in the period
before Electronic News Gathering, pose several preservation
problems that make television film particularly vulnerable.
Accordingly, the following technical recommendations attempt
to draw attention to troublesome areas that may suggest a re-
ordering of television film preservation priorities.
Magnetic-coated sound film, widely used in television news and
documentary production is far less stable than optical sound.
Another fragile format for television sound is synchronized
1/4-inch audiotape recordings, typically found among outtakes
and trims from television documentaries. To make matters even
worse from the standpoint of preservation, films and magnetic
tracks, and sometimes audiotapes, are often all stored in the
same container, much to their detriment, because the metal
ions act as a catalyst in the deterioration process of vinegar
syndrome.

4. The following recommendations are addressed to problems
identified with sound elements for television film:
A. Monitor the peel force or iron oxide shedding of
magnetic stripe or full-coat sound tracks and, depending upon
results, schedule the tracks for copying.
B. Transfer 1/4-inch synchronized sound tracks, also
highly susceptible to deterioration, to archival recording
tape as defined by the Association of Recorded Sound
Collections (ARSC):namely, analog, backcoated 1.5 mil tape
recorded at 7 or 15 ips, full track.
C. Store magnetic tracks in separate containers and never
in the same container with the original film.

5. Arrange, inspect, and repair small rolls of news footage
or outtakes and assemble them into larger reels to promote
efficient preservation, management and access.

Small reels or rolls squeezed into a large can pose a problem
for local television news archives, a problem which makes
preservation management and access extremely difficult and
labor intensive. This prevalent condition represents one of
the reasons why in the 1970's local stations decided to
destroy their news film libraries or give them to a public
archives. Local television news archives generally lack the
resources for the archival processing of news footage. Yet
internal arrangement is critical for archival control.
Preservation management, description, and research access all
assume some archival control. Two approaches to the problem
may be ventured. One is to conduct the internal arrangement
first and then make copies. Another is to make new copies
first and then subsequently perform the internal arrangement.
This seemed preferable because the separate rolls may have
been shot under different circumstances and therefore require
different grading. Internal arrangement should take into
account the "winds" or emulsion position of the rolls,
negative and positive elements, separate tracks, chronological
order, and any captioning usually indicated on adhesive tape.

6. The archival considerations governing the copying of
television film are both technical and philosophical. Films
are routinely transferred to videotape for production and
broadcasting. Public archives regularly transfer films to tape
in order to make access copies. Outside the major studios, few
television films are being copied to new film for
preservation. Local television news archives, to be sure, have
traditionally lacked the resources to make film copies. Even
the news divisions of the major networks with all of their
resources have no current plans to make film copies of their
extensive news footage. The preservation of local and network
television news film seems to be in a hold pattern, with no
strategic plan for the future. The recommendations below
describe two avenues of approach that, in the final analysis,
may be complementary.

A. It is recommended that television film should be preserved
as film and that any new copies should meet the highest
standards within laboratory capabilities, so as to replicate
the picture and sound quality and character of the original.
Film-to-film copying is especially recommended for films or
footage of exceptional historical or other value. Except for
high-end production, video transfers cannot match film's
resolution or its life expectancy when placed in proper
storage. Nor can videotape formats match film's technological
stability.(146) For a realistic comparison between film and
videotape as alternatives, it is necessary to consider long-
term costs for periodic re-formatting compared to one-time
costs for duplication as film.

B. Film-to-videotape transfers may serve as preservation
copies in situations that require the copying of extensive
quantities of unedited news or documentary footage showing
signs of deterioration and for which it appears impracticable
to accomplish film-to-film copying in a time frame that will
prevent significant losses. Such copies should be made on
modern telecine scanners; the copying should be "supervised"
rather than "unsupervised"; and the copies should be broadcast
quality as judged by the most current standards.

Where time is an essential consideration, scanning may be a
cost-effective means for copying extensive news footage,
outtakes, and other kinds of film documentation yet achieving
high quality reproductions. Due to improvements in the design
of modern telecine scanners, excellent results are often
achieved, especially in combination with supervised transfers
that provide for color and contrast correction scene to scene.
Inexpensive video study copies can also be made simultaneously
with the new video master. Among the disadvantages of
scanning is a reduction in resolution from the film copy.
However, this loss becomes moot if the only intended use is
broadcast or the production of video study copies. This method
of approach assumes that the new video masters will be managed
like original videotape recordings. The main disadvantages of
scanning are the reduced life expectancy of the new copy,
compared to film; and, the inadequacy of copies made under
current NTSC standards to meet the future needs of advanced
television systems. If the original film is still extant, re-
scanning would be needed to take advantage of higher
resolution capability of advanced systems; a further argument
for not only retaining film originals as long as possible but
also making film preservation copies for the start.

These technical considerations aside, the recommendations on
copying television film for preservation offer public
archives, in particular, local television news archives, a
dual strategy for preservation planning and funding. Ideally
all television film having permanent value should be copied to
film, and, if plotted over the next hundred years, the film
choice may be the most economical one. However, when this
option is not available, public archives can still act
responsibly by converting to broadcast-quality video.

7. Encourage television producers to re-examine their
policies with respect to "conforming" film originals.

This recommendation is directed at a growing trend in the
production industry that has alarming archival ramifications.
Nonlinear editing systems have relegated the film original to
a virtual obsolete status. Because film-originated programs
can be edited on a computer harddrive, together with graphics
and opticals from a separate source, and output to a videotape
master, all subsequent editing, duplication, and broadcast are
based upon the videotape copies. As an economy measure, the
film originals are not fully edited to match the finished
version but only placed in storage along with an Edit Decision
List (EDL), on the basis of which an edited version might be
reconstructed. This practice allows producers to reduce
production costs; however, the tradeoff is the potential loss
of the most stable version. The EDL's also represent a long-
term risk when they are maintained as disks or computer files
outside the control of records programs for the management of
electronic records. For these reasons it is imperative to
treat the video master as an original to be managed in
accordance with the principles of video preservation as
described in the next part.

PART TWO: VIDEOTAPE RECORDINGS
General

Most of America's television and video heritage has been
recorded on videotape. Due to the technical limitations of
past and current manufacturing processes and recording
technology, no videotape copy by itself reasonably constitutes
an archival copy. Rather, video preservation is a continuing
process similar to the archival management of any electronic
data that migrates from one storage technology to another to
avoid loss through obsolescence. Fundamentally, format
obsolescence and the videotape's tendency to deteriorate in
long-term storage pose equal risks to America's audiovisual
heritage. Nonetheless, given sufficient funding, archives can
minimize these risks by following guidelines identified in
this report.

It is important to understand that the parameters of video
preservation as defined below, in terms of current
technologies, avoid specifying either analog or digital
systems. To be sure, there are persuasive arguments for each.
For example, analog 1-inch type C, widely used in the
industry since the late 1970's, has proven to be fairly
reliable, and, as an analog signal system, its deterioration
is measurable, occurring in progressive stages that allow
sufficient time for recopying. The technical viability of 1-
inch Type C systems may be assumed for another ten years. As
relatively new recording media, digital tape systems offer
higher performance because their coatings are able to record
more data, but their most attractive archival feature is an
ability to clone new copies. Among some aspects giving cause
for concern are the proliferation of digital formats and early
obsolescence, miniaturization of tape width and thickness,
densely packed recording tracks, vulnerabilities of metal
coatings, and a potential for catastrophic failure of the
recording without any warning. In some instances a digital
copy of an analog recording does not yield the best results.
In the future the issue of analog versus digital will become
moot as industry phases out the production of analog recorders
and parts. Currently, archives have a choice.

Working Definition of Video Preservation
Video preservation, regardless of image source, is an
archival system that ensures the survival in perpetuity
of the program content according to the highest technical
standards reasonably available. There are three major
facets of video preservation: (1) safeguarding the
recording under secure and favorable storage conditions,
(2) providing for its proper restoration and periodic
transfer to modern formats before the original or next
generation copy is no longer technologically supportable,
and (3) continuing protective maintenance of at least a
master and a copy, physically separated in storage,
preferably in different geographic locations.

1. Storage

The storage of videotape is a complex issue because of the
continuing debate about whether to save the artifact as long
as possible or only long enough so that it can be migrated to
another format. Proponents of the former position, usually
public archives, tend to favor cooler and drier storage
conditions. The reason is to prolong the life-expectancy of
videotapes as long as possible, because the resources to re-
format them do not seem to be available in the foreseeable
future. Those who take the other position, usually
broadcasters, tend to favor storage climates that approximate
conditions of actual use. In reality the life expectancy of
videotape as measured in various storage conditions cannot be
plotted with much accuracy. Much more research and guidance
are needed in this area.(147) Nonetheless, the improvement of
storage conditions remains one of the most important
strategies for maintaining tapes in good condition.

1.1 Depending upon an institution's mission and objectives,
the following standards are applicable to extended-term
storage of videotape:
A. American National Standards Institute IT9.23 Polyester-
based Magnetic Tape: Storage (1996, approved in draft). See
the published version of this document for additional details
on storage conditions.
Temperature F RH%
68 20-30
59 20-40
50 20-50
B. Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers,
Recommended Practice 103. See SMPTE, RP 103, "Proposed SMPTE
Recommended Practice: Care, Storage, Operation, Handling and
Shipping of Magnetic Recording Tape for Television," SMPTE
Journal (October 1994), pp. 693-695, for a detailed discussion
of storage practices. RP103, published in draft, may not be
fully accepted in all its provisions.

Temperature F RH%
63 +/-4 30%

These recommended storage standards represent relatively cool
temperatures and less humid conditions. Reductions in
temperature and humidity will slow down the chemical aging of
videotape and may therefore be beneficial; freezing videotape,
however, generates harmful effects, and conditions below
50ø/20% should be avoided. Utilizing cooler and drier storage
conditions requires appropriate periods of acclimation before
use.

1.2 Create regional or shared storage facilities for public
archives that cannot afford to install or maintain climate-
controlled vaults; encourage public and corporate archives to
use commercial facilities if their own storage areas are
inadequate; and, establish national standards for videotape
storage facilities.

The administrative and financial complexities of creating
regional or shared storage are no doubt manifest, but at
minimum such storage can be accomplished informally between
institutions. Commercial storage may be suitable if the
facilities meet established archival guidelines in terms of
security, fire protection, and protection from flood damage,
temperature, humidity, and air quality. Temperature and
relative humidity should be documented electronically or
through the use of a hygrothermograph. Archives using
commercial storage should inspect the facilities at least once
each year.

1.3 Encourage the dispersal of copies in separate geographic
storage sites to guard against complete loss in the event of a
major catastrophe at one site.

Production organizations with a significant economic
investment in television materials have already sensed the
critical importance of placing copies in different locations
for security. Catastrophic loss at one location should not
affect their ability to conduct business or generate new
copies and thus secure their creation for posterity. Relying
on one central storage location assumes a certain amount of
risk. Budget limitations often prevent public archives from
practicing strategic dispersal. Storing all copies in the same
building but in different vaults or in different parts of the
same vaults often represents a form of compromise. In its
effect, this recommendation promotes the duplication of
multiple new copies as a security measure against possible
loss. All archives should ask themselves whether they possess
collections or individual titles of exceptional importance
whose total loss to the national heritage would be tragic and
unconscionable. This question may provide some guidance on
what copies should be stored at multiple sites.

1.4 Sponsor storage studies aimed at providing archives with
information that will enable them to plot life expectancies
for videotape maintained under a variety of conditions, in
order that this information may be used in designing videotape
storage facilities and in planning duplication programs.

Television archives lack guidance for estimating the life
expectancies of videotapes under various storage conditions.
Compared to data for film storage, for which excellent studies
exist, current storage information on videotape provides
insufficient guidance for the design and construction of
vaults. Archives need to know in more precise terms the
effects of storage histories. Also, archives need cost-
effective options, especially the requirements for storage at
different intervals, from ten to twenty years and beyond.
Realistic assumptions about life expectancies in storage form
the basis of preservation duplication programs to counter the
effects of deterioration and format obsolescence.

2. Maintenance of Videotape Holdings
2.1 Disseminate information on the life-cycle management of
videotape.

Life-cycle management of videotapes runs from their creation
or acquisition, through maintenance and use, and their
ultimate disposition or retention in an archives. Life-cycle
management can include such features as the initial purchase
of videotape stock, its utilization by producers and others,
handling and storage, aging characteristics, and disposition
alternatives, including transfer to a public archives.
Manufacturers could help considerably by attaching an advisory
notice on each cassette to the effect that the product should
be handled with care and stored properly. (See Appendix H for
a suggested advisory label.) Preservation can start with the
first day of the videotape's use. An indication of the date
of manufacture would also be immensely helpful.

2.2 Provide archives with a standardized set of procedures
and evaluation criteria for the initial inspection and
examination of videotape.

The archival field lacks a common vocabulary and standards for
documenting the physical and electronic condition of
videotapes newly accessioned or acquired by an archives. Most
videotapes are placed in long-term storage without an initial
examination or inspection. Inspection records or reports are
rare. This stands in sharp comparison to the care and
treatment of films whose physical condition is carefully
documented.

2.3 Sponsor research for evaluating the surface contaminants
on videotape and for determining appropriate cleaning techniques.

The products of videotape contamination are not fully
understood or easily identifiable. There is strong
disagreement among experts concerning the identification of
contaminants. Effective cleaning techniques for one kind of
contaminant can be disastrous for another.

2.4 Sponsor or prepare a manual on the preservation
management of videotape collections and an anthology of
previously published articles and other writings relating to
the history and preservation of videotape.

There is no single publication that may be regarded as a
complete manual for the preservation management of videotape
archives. Although studios and networks have impressive
technical expertise on their staffs, most public archives must
rely on published sources. Many useful articles and other
publications have appeared over the years on specific and
general aspects of video preservation, but they are widely
scattered in journals, newsletters, conference papers and
other sources now difficult to obtain.(148) Compilation of
such an anthology assumes copyright permission can be
negotiated. Both the manual and anthology should include
essential information on all aspects of the technical
management of videotape archives, including topics such as the
history of videotape formats, arrangement, storage, container
housings, inspection, rewinding, handling, maintenance and
use, duplication, restoration and cleaning, and re-mastering.
Similarly, workshops, lectures, symposia, and university
curricula can enlarge the knowledge baseline in the management
of video archives. Without this knowledge baseline, it is
difficult for archivists to understand the important issues,
pose the right questions to laboratories, and make informed
choices.

3. Duplicating, Transferring, and Restoration
3.1 Encourage archives and other interested organizations to
transfer obsolete videotapes to new formats well before the
commercial demise of the support technology.

This recommendation encourages a managed approach to re-
formatting which aims at the incremental and systematic
copying of obsolete formats while experienced technicians,
playback equipment, and spare parts are still reasonably
available. Collections of already obsolete recordings should
receive the highest priority for conversion. Excessive
deferral of this work can only lead to unwieldy conversion
projects with questionable, even impossible standards and high
costs.

3.2 Encourage public and corporate archives to rationalize or
apportion their priorities for re-mastering or transferring.

Public archives should avoid replicating the preservation work
carried out in corporate archives but should instead build
upon it as part of an overall strategy. In other words,
public archives should adjust their resources for re-mastering
to accommodate videotapes not likely to be copied in corporate
archives---assuming that corporate archives are willing to
provide information about their collections. Public archives
have a legitimate need to identify the location of master
copies; therefore, open and continuing dialogue between public
and corporate archives is necessary.

3.3 Select a video host format for re-mastering guided by the
following considerations: (1) its overall physical durability;
(2) its general availability and non-proprietary nature of the
support technology, i.e., videotapes and playback equipment;
(3) its ability to replicate the maximum informational content
and aesthetic appearance of the original as closely as
possible; and (4) its ability to reproduce new copies with the
least amount of signal loss.

This recommendation cautions archives against adoption of the
latest or cutting edge video technology for its own sake. Such
choices limit the chances for long-term survival of
collections if archives are committed to a format that may
prove to be nondurable, used only in a restricted market, and
dependent upon only one manufacturer who faces no competition
and whose supply policies are subject to change. Also, some
analog-to-digital conversions can change the character of the
image in the new copy to such an extent that it cannot
constitute an accurate copy of the original. Video art often
exceeds broadcast standards, which causes reduced luminance in
new copies, altering the look of light and shadows. Despite
the extraordinary manipulative or creative techniques that can
be employed in making a digital copy of an analog recording,
archives must still strive to preserve the content and
character of the original recording without creating doubts
about its integrity or authenticity as a historical record or
cultural artifact.

The following recommendations will help to ensure the
technical adequacy of archival copies.

3.4 Transfer analog videotapes from the earliest generation
or best surviving copy.

As a guiding principle for all analog video copying, this is
especially critical for works of video art and recordings made
on consumer formats where there is little tolerance for
generational loss. Consultations with the original video
artists, if possible, on the quality or adequacy of transfers
are also advisable.

3.5 Clean videotape originals before transferring or re-
mastering to a new format.

This recommendation is especially critical for tapes stored
under poor conditions or if they possess any detectable
contamination. Several organizations, having conducted large-
scale 2-inch transfer programs, found it cost-effective to
clean all tapes beforehand rather than risk damage to
expensive magnetic heads from deteriorating tapes. Valuable
tapes should be cleaned only by laboratories that use
equipment proven to be safe and effective. Since there are few
pertinent industry standards governing such work, conducting
tests and restricting work to laboratories of known
reliability are prudent measures.

3.6 Record new copies on previously unrecorded blank
videotape made by well-established brand-name manufacturers.

The purpose of this recommendation is to ensure the best
possible recording and to use tapes of a known reliability in
terms of manufacturing processes and warranties. As another
precaution, new videotapes should be evaluated for dropouts
before being used to carry preservation masters.

3.7 Re-record consumer and miniature formats to durable
professional format videotape.

Formats like EIAJ, VHS, 8mm, and Hi8, or their digital
successors may have been very effective in recording images
for viewing and study and for some aspects of documentary
production and ENG, but they may not be the best formats for
preservation. Choices for preservation should be guided by the
considerations identified in Recommendation 3.3 of this part.
(See also Tables 3 and 4, Chapter 2.)

3.8 Record programs off-air through an off-line connection
and use professional format videotape.

This recommendation pertains to archives and libraries that
take advantage of the federal authority to copy and retain
newscasts or, through license agreements, other television
programs. If the intention is to create a permanent record,
the use of a professional tape format is essential. More
format options are available for making study copies.

4. Laboratory Services
4.1 Encourage commercial vendors to offer services for
obsolete video formats at a reasonable cost to accommodate the
needs of public archives as well as those of the industry.

The crisis represented by obsolete EIAJ and 2-inch recordings
underscores dependence upon commercial vendors. The
acquisition, maintenance, and operation of obsolete machines
lie beyond the technical capabilities of most public and
corporate archives. Under the present circumstances, such
laboratory work must be carried out in the private sector.
Until now a lack of funding for television preservation limits
what can be sent to a vendor laboratory. It is also
conceivable that the vendors will significantly reduce or
eliminate 2-inch service after industry needs have been met.
If this occurs, the remaining uncopied 2-inch tapes in public
archives will be useless. Finally, public archives can
encourage vendors to lower costs through flexible time-
delivery frames, group purchases of services and long-term
commitments and, possibly, through other less tangible means
such as referrals. Vendors can also lower costs to public
archives by offering grants and subsidies.

4.2 Establish nonprofit video preservation centers.

The Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) in San Francisco serves as
an example of a nonprofit media production center that can
provide critical services for restoration of obsolete formats,
such as EIAJ open-reel tapes and U-matic cassettes, to arts
groups and nonprofit communities. Similar facilities are
needed in other parts of the country, in particular in those
regions not adequately served by vendor facilities, so that
historic video programs sponsored by federal, state and
private funders can be restored and re-formatted as part of
preservation programs. Without access to such facilities and
their services, the higher costs of commercial laboratories
may effectively consign historic video collections held by
arts groups and independent video organizations to oblivion.
Improved preservation funding, however, would make commercial
services more affordable.

4.3 Establish a Study Center For Video Preservation.

A compelling national need exists for a Study Center for Video
Preservation. Resources allocated to the study of video
preservation have been meager relative to the widespread
importance of television and video in so many facets of
American life. It is as if there were little concern with
saving a moving-image record of our history and culture in all
their manifestations. Yet concerns about the transience of
videotape and the threat of technological obsolescence are
genuine and pervasive, having been expressed by scholars,
archivists, and representatives from industry. The purpose of
a study center, therefore, would be to collect all relevant
resources relating to the technological history of television
and video, and to make these resources available to any
individual or organization in need of them, including public
archives and other nonprofit organizations as well as private
industry. The resources should include, at a minimum, a
library of publications such as books, journals, manuals,
equipment catalogs, manufacturers's literature, newsletters,
and related ephemera. Second, the center should maintain a
comprehensive inventory of obsolete videotape playback
equipment in good working order, plus spare parts. Equipment
could also include a museum of historically significant
obsolete video production equipment, such as the first stand-
alone time base corrector and artist-built video colorizers
and synthesizers, and a representative selection of obsolete
television sets retained to replicate broadcasts from a given
era. Most equipment could come from donations. Third, the
center should work closely with restoration laboratories and
television engineers and other experts in order to commission
tests of videotape binders in an empirical setting outside the
considerations or influence of manufacturers, and to maintain
a list of referrals for the benefit of the archival community
and all others who may have need of guidance and expertise in
video preservation. Fourth, the center should develop and
offer a variety of training programs about video preservation
techniques. In conclusion, dividing these responsibilities
over a number of institutions may be wasteful and would not
take into account the required level of skills and expertise
that would be needed for effective operations. Yet one
facility, properly staffed and equipped, could perform a great
national service.
B. ACCESS TO TELEVISION AND VIDEO ARCHIVES

Recommendations

Educators who testified in the public hearings strongly and
consistently indicated that access to television and video
archives for educational purposes is limited for a variety of
reasons, the most vexing of which they attribute to copyright.
Accordingly, the purpose of these recommendations is to
suggest methods or policies that remove obstacles or at least
mitigate their impact on research and education. The careful
preservation work of an archives is only validated when it
provides public access. The most thorough and painstaking
preservation work on television and video materials is
incomplete without improving public access in some way.

What does it mean to define access in an archival context?
"Access" is the freedom or ability to obtain and make use of
something. Archival access means a researcher's ability to
consult records or documents together with the ability to
reproduce them. Broadly speaking, many archival policies
directly or indirectly affect access. First, appraisal and
selection policies determine what materials will be housed in
an archives. Second, archival accessions or acquisition
agreements make it possible for the donor to control use of
materials above and beyond the normal protection of copyright
law. Third, preservation policies determine what copies will
be available for consultation, loans, or exhibition. Fourth,
description policies determine what will be cataloged first
and the degree of subject detail. They also determine what
will be made available through the Internet. These policies
are especially pertinent to public archives, which exist to
serve the needs of researchers. Corporate archives exist to
serve the needs of their own organizations. In their view,
public access is not a primary issue, yet it has become
increasingly clear that the commercial value of these holdings
actually increases as the public becomes more aware of their
contents. Consequently, the interests of corporate archives
may be served by increased scholarly and public access.

Access to television and video materials may be divided into
four broad areas: description, consultation, reproduction, and
use. Description includes general guides, catalogs, or other
finding aids. A modern assumption is that these materials
should be searchable on the Internet. Consultation refers to a
researcher's ability to view and study the audiovisual
document. Reproduction refers to a researcher's ability to
obtain a copy. Finally, use refers to the ability to reproduce
the audiovisual document for such purposes as public
exhibition, display in a classroom, documentary production,
and re-broadcast.

1. Appraisal and Selection
Public and corporate archives should act in concert to ensure
that no significant part of the national collection is
destroyed, and they should seek the advice and opinions of
scholars, educators and other interested parties to determine
appropriate appraisal and selection guidelines.

Appraisal and selection of television materials should be
viewed as a process leading toward the accumulation of a
national collection essential for documenting the audiovisual
heritage of the American people. This process is not
necessarily limited to public archives, since corporate
archives also make decisions on what will be saved or
destroyed. For example, the huge inventories of 3/4-inch U-
matic cassettes in corporate archives will require a system of
triage to distinguish between tapes that can be re-formatted
and those that can be left to deteriorate or donated to a
public archives. In the world of videotape, local television
news stations tend to erase everything. Decisions to retain
or destroy television or video materials should be based upon
broadly determined criteria. To do otherwise makes it
impossible to document the American intellectual heritage. Yet
the expertise for identifying the materials most important to
this heritage is often found outside public and corporate
archives. When appraisal decisions are made in isolation,
without any reference to users, to scholarly publications,
research trends, and lacunae, they tend to be arbitrary,
mistaken, and presumptuous. Archives located at universities
have an advantage in their ability to seek guidance from
historians, political scientists, sociologists, and other
scholars. To increase their ability to make informed
decisions, other archives should organize outside advisory
groups comprising scholars from different disciplines. The
following actions may be viewed as part of an effort to take
advantage of the expertise and interests of educators who
represent the research community.

1.1 Develop recommended standards or appraisal criteria for
selection and preservation of television programming. The
draft standards circulated by the International Federation of
Television Archives (IFTA/FIAT) serve as a useful model. (See
Appendix F.) We should make the earliest surviving television
materials a major national and local priority because so much
has already been lost and extant materials continue to
deteriorate.

1.2 Create an inter-disciplinary advisory board to identify
the most important programs and events televised each year to
ensure that appropriate copies are safeguarded and to
encourage prompt availability in public archives.

1.3 Develop recommended standards or appraisal criteria
specifically for television news in a 24-hour environment and
for unedited news and documentary materials.

1.4 Identify broadcasts of national television news, news
magazines, and documentaries, past, present, and future, as
important historical records of the American people that
should be preserved in their entirety.

1.5 Encourage local television news stations to work closely
with advisory boards and local public archives (1) to halt
further destruction of extant film news libraries; and (2) to
identify videotape coverage of enduring significance to the
history and culture of the locality or region.

1.6 Recognize the importance of video art and independent
documentary production, especially those works that offer an
alternative perspective, and stimulate their collection.

1.7 Support the acquisition of selected advertising
commercials and educational and industrial videos dealing with
public and private concerns, including political commercials
and campaigns for public awareness of social issues.

1.8 Identify home video as a potentially valuable source of
social documentation.

1.9 Develop collaborative methods for deaccessioning unwanted
materials so that other repositories can review them before
destruction takes place.

1.10 Survey foreign archives and other sources to repatriate
copies of American television and video programs neither
preserved nor accessible in the United States.

2. Description: Cataloging, Documentation, and Data Exchange.
Support public policies that encourage the widespread
dissemination of information through the Internet and other
networked sources.

Access to information about television and video materials is
essential (1) to foster the interests of the research
community, and (2) to rationalize descriptive and preservation
priorities among archives with overlapping collections.
Archivists need to develop the same ardor for television and
video materials that librarians have for bibliographic control
and dissemination of book-related information throughout the
United States. The need for information is acute on many
levels. What particularly impedes research is the absence of a
national union listing of television and video holdings in
public and corporate archives. Beginning a research project
results in much wasted effort through trial and error, and
this at a time when researchers have rising expectations
about quality of information that can be found on the
Internet. Happily, more databases, selective though they may
be, are beginning to appear on-line, but television archives
typically have extensive backlogs of uncataloged
materials.(149) Video art and independent video holdings
are even more difficult to identify because of a history of
insufficient funds for cataloging or descriptive programs and
because most are not held in traditional archives. Corporate
databases, to the extent they exist, have barely moved beyond
title and audiovisual components. Corporate marketing staffs
could more fully exploit their extensive television assets
with better automated subject control. A shared need for
cataloging may form the basis for partnerships between public
and corporate archives. Ways need to be found so that
cataloging benefits corporate, scholarly and educational use.
At a minimum, public archives should coordinate their own
cataloging efforts; repositories should be encouraged to
contribute descriptive information and make it known to
researchers.

2.1 Take steps to increase the amount of descriptive
information about television and video holdings, past and
present, in public and corporate archives across the country
to order to create an easily shared knowledge baseline of what
programs existed, what still survives, and where it is
located. This knowledge baseline should include the following:

A. A national union listing of public and corporate
archives and any other relevant collections.
B. A network of publicly shared databases, including the
National Moving Image Database (NAMID), and other databases
created by public and corporate archives. This recommendation
recognizes the likelihood that organizations may want to
restrict some information for only staff use, and that
editorial standards will vary.
C. A comprehensive catalog of American television and
video by decade.

2.2 Underscore the importance and necessity for funding
standardized cataloging to improve subject access. Funding of
television and video preservation programs should include
provisions for cataloging. Description of minimum data
elements should be viewed as a temporary but highly useful
first alternative step to cataloging.

2.3 Encourage the collection and preservation of the
informational content of scripts, camera notes, promotional
items, and other documentation that provide historical context
to television and video materials.

3. Physical Availability of Television and Video Materials
Increase the physical and electronic availability of
television materials, minimizing regional and economic
barriers.

Using television and video materials effectively for research
and teaching depends upon having physical access to copies on
premises and off site. Improvements in technology suggest that
increasingly access will be provided through electronic
communications systems. At the present time researchers having
access to cities like New York, Washington, and Los Angeles
are usually well served by the archives, libraries, and
museums located there. But there are great disparities in
availability throughout the rest of the country. Public
archives are typically set up to accommodate individual
researchers, but poor funding impedes research, particularly
the lack of appropriate playback equipment, reference copies
and poorly arranged collections. Excessive donor restrictions
on study access and reproductions over unreasonably long
periods of time can also hamper access. Corporate archives,
including the networks and studios, cannot typically
accommodate scholars. Yet, by working through public archives,
corporations can provide access, minimizing their burdens of
time and cost. The following recommendations will help to
increase the availability of copies for study on a nationwide
basis:

3.1 Secure funding to enable public archives to carry out
basic archival processing, which includes making reference
copies.

3.2 Seek the opinions of scholars and educators in developing
priorities for making access copies.

3.3 Promote the use of inter-archival or library loans on a
cost basis.

3.4 Negotiate "pre-agreements" between public and corporate
archives so that scholars will have an ability to request
individual titles from corporate archives. For example, a
public archives would make a request on a scholar's behalf,
secure a copy from the corporate archives, and retain it for
future research needs. The terms and conditions of such
acquisitions and deposits should be worked out in advance and
not left to ad hoc agreements.

3.5 Encourage corporate archives or the video distribution
industry to increase the commercial availability of vintage
programs on video cassettes at reasonable prices.

3.6 Encourage the Library of Congress to use its current
authority under the Copyright Act to the fullest extent
possible for off-air taping of "published" and "unpublished"
television programs so that they will be promptly available
for on-premises research. (For a possible solution, see
Recommendation 10 under the funding section later in this
chapter.)

3.7 Encourage libraries and archives throughout the nation to
establish off-air taping projects for local and national
newscasts as authorized by the Copyright Act; and, through,
license arrangements, entertainment and other programs that
may be needed for research.

4. Reproduction and Use
Take steps to make it easier for scholars and educators to use
television and video materials in their research, writing and
teaching.

A basic requirement of access is the researcher's ability to
reproduce and use copies of television and video materials in
a classroom or lecture. Yet the ability to use the
reproduction for such scholarly purposes is governed by the
Copyright Act, which reserves these rights to the owner.
Congress has limited these rights to exclusive use through the
concept of "fair use," though in practice, it is rarely
applied to television and video materials. Researchers feel
they are confronted with two sets of contradictory fair use
standards, one set that permits some fair use in publishing
and another for audiovisual materials which effectively
discourages use. Teachers and scholars do not wish to work
under a constant threat of litigation. Nevertheless, such
fears are always among the concerns of archives and
researchers.

4.1 Simplify the process of rights clearances for television
and video materials along the lines of ASCAP for the music
industry or the Copyright Clearance Center for publishing and
take other steps to streamline procedures for obtaining rights
for classroom exhibition or other exhibitions in a nonprofit,
academic setting.

4.2 Make a strong case for price-breaks or moderate licensing
fees for noncommercial, educational use, including documentary
production and digital publishing formats such as CD-ROM,
above all in cases where there will be no adverse impact on
the market value of the audiovisual materials.

4.3 Encourage university administrators to allocate
sufficient funding for the creation of resources and the
acquisition and distribution of appropriate teaching materials
relating to media studies and to other academic disciplines
which make use of television as a subject matter.

Media resources, including descriptive information, should be
commensurate with the curriculum. Printed materials alone
will not suffice. In view of copyright or license
restrictions, universities may have to provide closed-circuit
delivery systems.

5. Copyright and Fair Use
Intensify formal and informal discussions (through
conferences, working groups, etc.) among educators, archivists
and industry officials as a means to seek workable solutions
on issues relating to copyright and educational access to
television and video archives.

In the view of scholars, the current effects of the Copyright
Act of 1976 and Congressional fair use guidelines discourage
research, writing and teaching with respect to the use of
television materials and impede the flow of programs into
public archives. At the same time, these materials are
becoming increasingly critical to the study of contemporary
American society, educators find that their efforts to obtain
access are inefficient, prohibitively expensive, or fruitless.
Copyright owners, on the other hand, see educational use as a
primary or ancillary sales market for audiovisual products.
Current off-air taping guidelines are inefficient for the
educational use of television materials. Especially
frustrating is the absence of fair use guidelines for the
publication of frame enlargements. Scholars view the
enlargements as critical to illustrate their research and
writing, and believe that publication of enlargements
represents an inconsequential part of the total program, and
that doing so in scholarly works with limited readership has
little or no adverse impact on the program's market value.
Some publishers accept this premise while others do not; in
the latter case, excessive copyright fees are often required.
Publication aside, archives should routinely provide frame
enlargements and make this right a standard clause in a deed
of gift or instrument of deposit.

Among the proposed issues for discussion by interested parties
are:

þ The fair use of film and video frame
enlargements for publication in scholarly
works.
þ Current off-air taping practices by archives
and libraries throughout the United States.
þ Possible revision of fair use guidelines and
policies for off-air recording television
programs for use in classroom teaching and for
retention by public archives and libraries.
þ Inter-archival and educational dissemination of
television programs through new technologies.
þ The adequacy of the Library of Congress off-air
taping authority for the American Television
and Radio Archives (ATRA).
þ The reproduction and use of television and
video materials whose owners can no longer be
identified.

These discussions should be widely based, drawing upon
scholars and educators, archivists, legislators, copyright and
broadcast attorneys, and industry representatives.

C. FUNDING PRESERVATION AND ACCESS AND INCREASING PUBLIC
AWARENESS

Recommendations
Part One: Funding

Historically, television has existed in the shadow of
Hollywood's film industry. The glamour of the film industry's
stars, intensive publicity campaigns, megadeals, and huge box
office grosses draw public attention away from the programs
created for commercial and public television that are equally
important and often more creative than the output of
contemporary American cinema. Television has been responsive
to and reflective of societal issues and concerns. Cinema may
have been the common bonding experience of this century's
first half, but television has taken over the major part of
that role. Yet, because of its constant appearance in American
homes, television has been seen as a less special medium.

This difference between film and television serves as a useful
introduction to understanding why funding for television and
video preservation has been so limited in comparison to what
has been made available for film preservation, most notably
through the National Endowment for the Arts/American Film
Institute grant program.(150) The urgency to rescue
nitrocellulose film, a much older medium than television film
or videotape, has overshadowed the needs of television and
video preservation. Respect for the age of documents is
usually a good maxim for archives to follow, but when applied
to audiovisual documents like photographs, film, and videotape
age is only relative. Thus some materials dating from the
early history of television have more historical or cultural
value than some silent-era nitrate films that have already
been preserved, even though the television records are less
than half as old. Public policies have tended to favor film
over television preservation.

As discussed earlier in this report, there are other reasons
that have tended to discourage funding for television and
video. Film preservation techniques and processes, having
been practiced for decades, are fairly well defined, and the
major practitioners in the United States are concentrated in a
relatively small number of organizations. Until now the
preservation of television and video has not been well
defined; building a consensus on preservation issues among
many and varied organizations has been a slow process. Left
unaddressed, genuine concerns over the transience of videotape
as a recording medium and video format obsolescence will
continue to discourage public or private funding for
preservation.

1. Establish in the private sector a permanent, nonprofit
entity dedicated to the cause of television preservation and
access. The organizationþs main duties will include: 1)
recognizing and demonstrating the continuing vital importance
of television and video to Americaþs cultural heritage, 2)
raising private funds on a national basis for preservation of
this heritage, 3) providing grants to support preservation and
access projects at nonprofit institutions with television and
video collections throughout the United States. 4) recognize
in a public manner individuals, companies, or other
organizations for outstanding achievements in safeguarding and
preserving the television and video heritage or for their
other contributions to this endeavor; and, otherwise using
every opportunity to keep television and video preservation
and access issues at the forefront of the national archival
agenda.

A compelling need exists for a separate organization that can
devote its energies to promote the needs of television and
video archives and to secure commitments for their support.
The Library of Congress, working closely with the Association
of Moving Image Archivists, industry representatives,
professional associations and other interested organizations,
will take the lead in developing the formal structure of this
institution, including its mission and responsibilities,
governance, etc.

2. Public archives should build a consensus around the
techniques of television and video preservation and make them
known to funding organizations. Foundations and other funders
should in turn review grant applications from television and
video archives on a equitable basis with those from film and
photographic archives. All funding sources should be more
responsive to the needs of television and video archives.

In the past television archives could not successfully compete
for grants based on the need for preservation because of a
bias favoring cinema and because the archival community had
not yet already defined preservation techniques for television
and video materials. The basic procedures and techniques for
video preservation are known and have been put into practice
at least partly by the major studios and other industry
organizations. Public archives by and large have not had much
of an opportunity to implement them due to a lack of funds.

3. Public archives should continue to expect federal agencies
to serve as vital sources for funding meritorious projects and
should therefore apply for every grant award for which they
feel qualified. Federal agencies should establish a
subcommittee of the Federal Funders Committee to improve
coordination of their policies with respect to funding
projects that involve videotape, film, photograph, and sound
recordings preservation and access.

During the last ten years three federal agencies awarded
approximately 1.5 million dollars for television preservation
and access projects. The agencies are the National Historical
Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives
and Records Administration, the Department of Education, and
the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under its most
recent guidelines, the National Endowment for the Arts would
seem to welcome preservation and access grant applications
relating to television and video materials having strong
artistic merit--indeed some past NEA media grants have
included a preservation provision. Declining budget resources
have restricted grant levels, particularly in the endowment
agencies. Yet these agencies still represent a source of
significant funding that could benefit television preservation
and access. Preservation has indirectly benefited since access
copies made under grants provide an additional dimension of
protection as a second copy, thereby eliminating the need to
handle the originals for routine use.

4. Pursue new avenues of financing of television and video
preservation should the opportunity occur to share in
dedicated tax programs.

The issue of a special tax has surfaced in past discussions
about alternative methods to funding public television, but
the approach has never been implemented owing in part to
objections from the industry and from the Department of
Treasury, traditionally opposed to dedicated taxes.
Nevertheless, this issue should be re-visited in consultation
with appropriate governmental and industry representatives.
Over the years, individuals have proposed at least, four
practical categories for the imposition of sales taxes to
benefit public archives: (1) on the purchase of new television
sets, VCR's, or blank videotape; (2) on the purchase of
television programs by a broadcaster; (3) on the sale of air
time for commercial ads; and (4) on the purchase of satellite
time. On balance, the additional costs to an individual
consumer or to a broadcaster could be negligible and still
raise three or four million dollars annually for public
archives. Rigorous economic analysis of the pros and cons of
various options is needed. To stand any chance for success in
this area, any proposal must be a consensus plan developed
with the participation of all affected parties.

5. Make a case for public archives to receive a benefit from
the FCC auction of broadcast spectrum.

No less controversial than dedicated taxes is the FCC auction
of broadcast spectrum to the industry, a public policy
steadfastly opposed by the National Association of
Broadcasters. The FCC has already auctioned spectrum to the
telecommunications industry, including Direct Broadcast
Services (DBS), raising almost twenty billion dollars for the
national treasury. A bill in the 104th Congress (H.R.2979)
proposed use of spectrum sales to establish a trust fund for
the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. A readjustment of
spectrum allocation is necessary to accommodate a shift from
analog to digital transmission. President Clinton has directed
the FCC to auction additional channels. The point is for the
archival community not to become engaged in the debate on
spectrum policy-- though some archives may wish to do so-- but
only to advocate the principle that broadcasters or
telecommunications companies which receive such lucrative
privileges should be obligated in some way to return a service
to the public archives that provide preservation of and access
to television materials. This service should take the form of
a percentage of auction sales of channels or, at a minimum, a
voluntary donation. Conversely, government could be asked to
consider making available a percentage of income from auction
sales to the proposed nonprofit organization (described
earlier) which will benefit all television and video archives.

These approaches to the public financing of television and
video preservation are worth pursuing. In conjunction with
their partners in production and in the broadcast industry,
public archives should consider presenting to Congress a
unified public-private request to initiate suitable
legislation. Broad industry support is a prerequisite for the
success of these initiatives.

6. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting should establish a
preservation grants programs pursuant to the Public
Broadcasting Act of 1967.

Throughout its existence the CPB has failed to provide funds
for the preservation of the programs it finances although this
responsibility is stated in its own enabling legislation. It
finances a small program at the Museum of Television and Radio
which allows the Musem to acquire access copies of a small
selection of each year's PBS output. Nor have PBS affiliates,
due to a constant shortage of funds, been able to accept
responsibility for preservation because production and
transmission are their main priorities. As the major custodian
of public television, PBS ended a short-lived archival program
several years ago, and in 1993 signed an agreement with the
Library of Congress which in effect makes the Library the
ultimate preservation custodian of PBS's extensive holdings.
WGBH in Boston is the only public television station with a
formal archival program. The PBS holdings are so extensive,
about 100,000 items and growing, that the Library of Congress,
which can provide proper storage, will need significant
assistance to ensure the preservation of the materials.
Accordingly, CPB should allocate funding for the establishment
of a grants programs for which organizations like the Library
of Congress, the Museum of Television and Radio, and the
National Public Broadcasting Archives can apply. Finally, the
Ford Foundation, which was the mainstay of educational
television before CPB, spending more than $82 million, should
be asked to consider assisting public archives to preserve
early educational programs.

7. Identify one or more broadcast companies willing to host a
direct public appeal for the benefit of television and video
preservation, an appeal to be accompanied by programs and
compilations from materials held in public archives.

In conjunction with the Film Foundation and the nitrate film
archives, American Movie Classics (AMC) has conducted at least
four public appeals for donations to support the preservation
of the American film heritage. These campaigns have succeeded
in raising several hundred thousand dollars for the benefit of
film archives.(151) A comparable broad-based campaign should
be conducted emphasizing the rich cultural value of the
American television and video heritage.

8. Although grants will be available from time to time from
national agencies, local television news archives should
approach regional, state, local, or municipal sources for the
primary funding of their activities.

To begin, local archives may need assignment of copyright so
that they can earn income to support archival activities.
Donors should weigh the benefits of donating rights for tax
purposes compared to potential earnings from the sale of stock
footage. Failing transfer of rights, local archives should
negotiate a share in any license or royalties from the sale of
stock footage and provide other services to commercial users
on a cost-plus basis. Second, local archives should ask for
stipends from broadcasters to support preservation and other
activities that benefit broadcast operations such as
cataloging and indexing. Such gifts may qualify as charitable
donations under tax codes. Third, local archives should ask
for donations of in-kind equipment and services from
broadcasters in their locality. Fourth, the National
Association of Broadcasters and state broadcasting
associations, preferably with corporate sponsorship, should
establish preservation funds for the benefit of the most
outstanding materials held by local television archives.
Fifth, since several state lotteries generate income to
support public education, local archives should consult with
their state governments to determine if they can be made
eligible to receive part of lottery earnings to expand
educational access to their holdings. Sixth, since almost ten
years have elapsed since the first and last local television
news archives conference, it is imperative that another be
held to address funding issues, among other important topics
relating to the management of local television news archives.

9. Public archives, producers, and broadcasters should
explore partnerships which serve the interests of the
nonprofit educational community.

The relationship between C-SPAN and the Public Affairs Video
Archives of Purdue University may serve as a useful model of
cooperation between a broadcasting organization and a public
archives. C-SPAN licenses PAVA to duplicate and distribute C-
SPAN programming for a fee which PAVA retains to support its
activities, including its off-air taping, description,
preservation, and reference. To stimulate usage, C-SPAN gives
grants to educators for the purchase of programs from PAVA.

10. Use the off-air recording facilities of the Library of
Congress to make copies of television programs for copyright
registration and charge copyright owners an appropriate fee to
cover the costs of this service.

Reduction in costs is an important incentive for broadcasters
to support this service, because it would be less expensive
for the Library of Congress to make copies automatically off-
air than for broadcasters and/or copyright owners to make them
as needed for copyright registration. The savings would derive
from systematic recording of all output in one location. To
cite an example, the National Film and Television Archive of
the British Film Institute for some years has received
substantial annual grants from commercial broadcasters to
record their programs off-air, using professional and study
quality formats. The BBC also provides a substantial grant to
the archives for recording off-air on S-VHS only, for public
access purposes. The Independent Television Authority, which
regulates commercial television, determines the amount of the
grants. Though the BBC grants are voluntary, its new Charter
obliges it to cooperate with the BFI/NFTA on archival issues.
In this manner both the archives's interests and those of
broadcasters are well served. (See Appendix J.)

Part Two: Increasing Public Awareness

Many early losses of television materials, including the
destruction and continuing erasure of local television news,
can be attributed to a lack of understanding of their
historical and cultural value. With a few notable exceptions,
it took the archival community too long to espouse a
preservation philosophy for television and video materials.
The urgency to save America's motion picture heritage, however
justified, has long overshadowed the needs of television and
video preservation. There are no television counterparts to
the National Film Preservation Board, the American Film
Institute, and the new National Film Preservation Foundation.
Public awareness programs should redress this imbalance.
Museum-based programs, though for the most part limited to
Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, have been fairly
successful in demonstrating the artistic and educational value
of materials in their custody through exhibits, seminars,
lectures, and repertory showings. These activities enlarge
and enrich public understanding of the need to preserve the
television and video heritage, and they provide useful
leverage for attracting financial assistance. In addition to
supporting educational work of broadcast museums, the
following initiatives are recommended.

1. Increase public awareness of the quality and broad range of
America's television and video heritage by compiling a
national registry of television and video treasures and
conducting a nationwide tour of selected programs.

2. Promote the need for television preservation in meetings,
newsletters, and journals of organizations like the NAB, ATAS,
NATAS, and the Peabody Awards and encourage them to give
periodic preservation awards, possibly supported by a
corporate sponsor.

3. Work through NAB in order to convey the preservation
message to local television news stations.

4. Produce a documentary on the problems of television and
video preservation and air related public service
announcements aimed at general audiences and potential
funders, and have these shown on public television stations,
cable television, and other outlets.

5. Include video art and independent video in public awareness
campaigns.

National Film Preservation Board - Motion Picture & Television Reading Room
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