NASHVILLE, Tenn. 3-22-2004. More than 30,000 videotaped hours of television news programming will be preserved digitally through a grant awarded to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Vanderbilt officials announced Monday that they had been notified that the grant for $281,154 had been approved.
"This grant is going to save the material from extinction," Vanderbilt University Librarian Paul M. Gherman said. "If we did nothing, this collection would be unusable in three to five years."
At stake is an important and always-growing cultural history of the United States, and a rich database for researchers investigating a wide array of issues from bias in the news media to how advertising has changed over the years.
The grant funds a two-year project to transfer programming recorded by the archive dating back to 1968 from three-quarter-inch U-Matic videotape to MPEG-2 digital video. The three-quarter-inch videotape format is nearly defunct, with playback equipment and spare parts increasingly hard to find.
A portion of the NEH grant comes from its "We The People" project which encourages the teaching of United States history and culture by supporting programs that explore significant themes and events that advance knowledge of the principles that define America.
"We're delighted that the NEH looked favorably on our digital preservation project," said Marshall Breeding, library technology officer at Vanderbilt. "They fully funded our proposal."
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive was conceived by the late Paul C. Simpson, a Nashville insurance executive and Vanderbilt alumnus. Simpson championed the concept of an independent archive for television news, and persuaded Vanderbilt University to take on the project initially as a three-month experiment in 1968. The archive was sustained in its early years primarily through foundation funding. Recently, a fee-based subscription service has been launched to provide financial support.
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive works in close partnership with the Library of Congress, which will be the permanent repository of the digital content it records.
"Given the enormous quantity of storage involved, this is a particularly challenging responsibility," Breeding said. "The large-scale digital preservation facilities of the Library of Congress will help to ensure that this collection will be available to researchers generations into the future."
The Library of Congress and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive have worked together for many years to preserve national television news programming. Before the archive switched to digital formats last year, the Library of Congress received videotape copies.
The archive will have wider availability after the transfer to digital format. Currently, in order to view the material, researchers must either visit the archive in Nashville or request a videotape loan. The archive creates copies of complete programs or compilations of assorted video clips on videotape for researchers through a fee-based service.
The abstracts and indexes made of each show are as valuable as the footage. Those allow researchers to pinpoint the shows they want, and allow for statistical studies of topics such as how often certain events are portrayed on the news.
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive has collected every newscast of ABC, NBC and CBS since Aug. 5, 1968. It has recorded one hour of CNN programming per day since 1995. It also records Nightline, presidential speeches and news conferences and political conventions. In addition, coverage of important events such as the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks, Watergate and the two Persian Gulf wars is collected.
It's the most extensive archive of its kind in the world. While the networks operate archives that include large collections of footage, and even whole programs, their archives are geared to their internal production operations rather than researchers. The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is unique in its collection of complete news broadcasts of all the major networks open to the general public with a videotape loan program that allows remote researchers to view material at affordable fees.
"We reproduce the cultural experience that people had in their living rooms when the newscasts first aired," Breeding said. "The archive records the advertising as well as the news content, adding yet another interesting dimension to the collection.
Cecelia Tichi, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Vanderbilt, calls the Vanderbilt Television News Archive "an invaluable resource in scholarly and classroom projects."
"While the value of preserving the nation's newspapers dating to the 18th century has been long recognized, only Vanderbilt University took the initiative to record and preserve the news as broadcast on television," Tichi said. "Beyond factual news content, the archived broadcasts show important changes in style, direction and production of the news."
Technology will continue to evolve, and the digital formats now being used will eventually become obsolete.
"The collection will inevitably need to be transferred to new formats in the future," Breeding said. "We anticipate that refreshing the collection from one digital format to another will be much easier than migrating the collection from videotape, the project made possible through this generous grant from the NEH."
The NEH grant follows a one-year investigation funded by the National Science Foundation that allowed the archive to design the equipment and processes that will be used to digitize the collection. The archive converted its off-air recording operation from videotape to digital in August of 2003.