Television/Video Preservation Study:
Washington, D.C. Public Hearing, March 1996
TELEVISION AND VIDEO
PRESERVATION 1997:
A Study of the Current State of
American Television and Video Preservation
Volume 4: Hearing, March 26, 1996
Washington, D.C.
Report of the Librarian of Congress
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Opening Remarks of Winston Tabb, Associate Librarian for Library
Services, Library of Congress
Introductory Remarks by James Billington, Librarian of Congress
Statements by:
Gerald George, Executive Director, National
Historical Publications and Records Commission
George Stevens, Jr., Independent Producer
David Culbert, International Association for Media And History
(IAMHIST), Editor, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television,
Professor of History, Louisiana State University, Baton
Rouge
Douglas Gomery, University of Maryland, College Park,
Professor, College of Journalism
Thomas Cripps, Morgan State University, Professor,
Department of History
Michael Curtin, Indiana University, Director
Cultural Studies Program
Thomas Doherty, Brandeis University, Chair,
Film Studies Program
Maxine Fleckner Ducey, President, Association of Moving Image
Archivists (AMIA)
Cary O'Dell, Archives Director, Museum of Broadcast Communications
John Lynch, Director, Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Robert Browning, Director, Purdue University Public Affairs Video
Archives
Lynda Lee Kaid, Director, Political Communications Center/
Political Commercial Archive, University of Oklahoma
Martin Gaston, The News Library, President, Veir, Inc.
Lisa Wood, Audiovisual Archivist, Margaret King Library,
University of Kentucky
Thomas Connors, Curator, National Public Broadcasting Archives,
University of Maryland
Paolo Cherchi-Usai, Senior Curator, Motion Picture Department,
George Eastman House International Museum of Film and
Photography
Barry Sherman, University of Georgia, Professor and
Director, Peabody Awards, School of Journalism
William Jarvis, WETA-TV, Vice-President and General Counsel
David Liroff, Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer, WGBH-TV
Glenn Clatworthy, Associate Director, Program Data and Analysis,
Public Broadcasting Service
Edward Coltman, Executive Director, New Media,
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Kathy Christensen, Vice-President, News Archives and Research,
CNN, (Presented by Elizabeth Sullivan)
Peter Gardiner, Vice-President, Corporate Film/Video Services,
Warner Bros.
John Craddock, Director, Post Production, East Coast Business
Affairs, Home Box Office
James Lindner, President, Vidipax, Inc.
PARTICIPANTS:
Panel Members:
DAVID FRANCIS
BARBARA RINGER
FRANK BURKE
WILLIAM MURPHY
P R O C E E D I N G S
MR. TABB: Will you please take your seats? I think it
is time for us to begin.
Good morning. I am Winston Tabb, the Associate
Librarian, Library of Congress and I am pleased to welcome all of
you to the Library of Congress' third and final hearing on the
Current State of American Television and Video Preservation.
I want to remind all of you to sign the guest register
just outside the back of the room, please.
The purpose of this hearing is to get specific
suggestions for the Library of Congress to consider in preparing
the comprehensive national program on American television and
video preservation for the United States Congress.
The pertinent issues include what should be saved, who
is doing it, who should do it, what are the technical
preservation standards and problems, how to be assured that they
are addressed and perhaps most important, how to fund--what
funding models seem most promising.
This hearing is undertaken in accordance with the
directive of Congress to the Library of Congress to "establish
and maintain in the Library of Congress, a library as an American
television and radio archives. "The purpose of the archives shall be to preserve a
permanent record of the television and radio programs which are
the heritage of the people of the United States and provide
access to such programs to historians and scholars without
encouraging or causing copyright infringement."
I regret that the person who is responsible for
accomplishing this objective of the Library of Congress,
Dr. Billington, has been called away from Washington today, but
he has asked that I read the remarks that he just made at the two
previous hearings that we have held in Los Angeles and New York.
So, I am going to read this for the record.
STATEMENT OF DR. BILLINGTON, PRESENTED BY WINSTON TABB
MR. TABB: Not long ago, I was a witness before our
House Appropriations Committee and I am happy to tell you that it
is much better to be on this side of table listening to other
people testify.
Today's hearing may not carry the legal and fiscal
implications of a Congressional hearing, but it is an important
event for the Library of Congress and the archival community and
for everyone who shares our concern about preservation of our
television and video legacy.
Our first two public hearings held in Los Angeles and
New York were very productive. The panels there heard statements
from archives, major studios, networks and educators and from
others who share our goals.
We hear encouraging reports from the major producers of
prime-time programming, because as commercial enterprises, they
have sufficient economic incentives to maintain their materials
under reasonably good conditions and thus ensure availability for
future use.
On the other hand, we heard from much smaller
organizations with little or no resources to safeguard and
preserve the valuable television and video materials in their
care.
As might be expected, the witnesses expressed views and
opinions as varied as the organizations they represented, a
testament in itself to how television and video has become
embedded in American life and culture.
This is the last of three public hearings the Library
of Congress will conduct this month. These are intended to help
develop a report on the Current State of American Television and
Video Preservation and even more important, a plan listing
recommendations.
Both the report and plan will be published later this
year as a single document. This activity is authorized under the
American Television and Radio Act of 1976 and is being pursued in
response to a recommendation from the National Film Preservation
Board and from many groups and individuals who helped draft
Redefining Film Preservation: A National Plan, which the Library
published in 1994.
The American Television and Radio Act authorizes the
Library of Congress to establish and maintain an archives whose
purpose is to preserve a permanent record of the broadcast
programs which are our heritage.
These hearings and the report to follow will help the
Library develop the actual policies to ensure that we can carry
out this work in concert with other archives and libraries and
with production and broadcast organizations.
These hearings and the report parallel our earlier film
preservation study in several important ways. First, we seek the
same goals. That is, to preserve the American television and
video heritage and make it more accessible for educational use.
Second, we wish to obtain a wide range of views and
opinions representative of the diverse interest that exists in
the creation, preservation and research use of moving images in
all its aspects, including arts and entertainment, news and
documentary, public affairs, video art and community video, just
to name some of the large categories.
Third, we wish to encourage other archives and
libraries to work with us to accomplish the very difficult task
of preserving television and video and making them available.
Finally, we wish to address the problems of funding
television and video preservation programs both in public
archives and industry, which is no easy task at a time when
resources are scarce, particularly relative to the preservation
workload ahead.
Public-private partnerships are essential. During the
course of these hearings, we hope to receive your recommendations
on how this partnership can be established.
There are other parallels with the film preservation
report worth mentioning. Like American film, much of the early
history of television has already been lost. Broadcasts were
live and kinescope or film recordings were used selectively.
Ampex introduced videotape recording technology in 1956
and since then the industry has manufactured or adopted numerous
incompatible video formats, making technological obsolescence a
major archival issue.
Like nitrocellulose, the staple of the film industry
until 1951, videotape has proven to be both a blessing and a
curse. We have entrusted our historical and cultural images to
videotape and yet it is highly vulnerable to degradation and
destruction.
Like film, everything associated with vide preservation
is expensive, including specialize storage facilities, electronic
equipment, a skilled technical staff and reformatting costs.
The very notion of reformatting large collections of
videotape is a daunting one, because their volume already exceeds
the means of most organizations.
Yet the rewards for safeguarding and preserving our
television and video heritage are immeasurable. No one can fully
understand who we are as a people and what we have become as a
society without having access to the recordings created by
television and video production during the last 50 years.
Historians, sociologists and other scholars, even
politicians and parents, debate the causal relationship of
television to the society at large. In the future, such debates
will be fruitless if the historical evidence does not survive.
In conclusion, the Library of Congress encourages all
of you at the audience to write down your opinions and
recommendations which we will collect up until April 29.
Today we will hear from a number of distinguished
individuals, some professionals in the field, others representing
important organizations that share our goal of preserving
American television and video.
On behalf of the Library of Congress, I want to thank
all of you who have taken time from your busy schedules to
participate in this event and especially those of you who have
come from out of town at your own expense. We appreciate your
interest and concern and will ensure that your efforts are not in
vain.
MR. TABB: Before we actually begin the hearing, I want
to take a few minutes to thank those who have been most
responsible for getting us here today. One is sitting beside me,
David Francis, who is chief of the Library's Motion Picture,
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.
Steve Leggett, who is standing at the back, always
ready to jump and help us do whatever needs to be done. Finally,
Bill Murphy, who is on loan to us from the National Archives and
Records Administration, serving this year as our project
coordinator.
I would now like to introduce our panelists. I already
mentioned David, who is on my left. On my right is Frank Burke
who is now Professor at the University of Maryland, the College
of Library and Information Science, but also is known to many of
us as the former acting archivist of the United States.
It gives me particular pleasure to introduce to all of
you--most of who may know Barbara already--Barbara Ringer, who is
the Register of Copyrights Emerita, but I think also for today we
should refer to her as the mother of this ATRA Act.
Someone who is very responsible for getting this law
enacted and who has waited very patiently for 20 years for the
Library to really take this as seriously as we ought to have
done. So this is both a public apology, Barbara, and a thank you
for coming and helping us continue this work that you began so
long ago.
MS. RINGER: My pleasure.
MR. TABB: Now just a few minutes on the ground rules.
We are very pleased that 26 people have asked to testify today,
but given our time restraints, we will have to ask that everyone
make their remarks in ten minutes or less and try to focus
particularly on suggestions, not just on description.
I will be fairly ruthless in wielding the gavel to be
sure that the panel that is scheduled for the end of the day is
not short changed.
We have organized the speakers into panels representing
different focuses of our study and I will ask that each panel
come to the table together and then let the speakers present
their testimony in the order listed in the program that we
distributed out in the lobby.
At this table, we will hold our questions until the end
of each panel, unless there is a need for clarification about
something that we cannot understand at all.
After all the speakers on the panel have given their
prepared statements, I will invite my colleagues here to ask
follow-up questions during the balance of the time allotted to
that group.
All written comments and the transcripts of the
proceedings today will be printed and available to the public as
an appendix to the report that we submit to Congress later this
year.
I remind you again that we will invite the speakers,
observers, anyone else who has a strong interest in this matter,
to submit written comments to Steve Leggett of our Motion Picture
Division by April 29. The hearing record will remain open until
that time.
All right. Now we will begin by calling our first two
panelists. Will you please come forward to the table?
We are glad to welcome as our first panel Gerald
George, who is the executive director of the National Historical
Publications and Records Commission on which I am also pleased to
serve as a member.
A special welcome to George Stevens, Jr., formerly a
member of the National Film Preservation Board and a long time
friend to the Library of Congress.
Will you go ahead and begin, Jerry?
STATEMENT OF GERALD GEORGE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL
HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS AND RECORDS COMMISSION
MR. GEORGE: Thank you very much, Commissioner Tabb. I
am glad that you called attention to the fact that you are a
member of my Commission and with you at the table, along with Dr.
Burke, my predecessor as director of NHPRC once removed, I feel
very comfortable on this occasion.
In fact, if you have a number of questions I cannot
answer, I not only will enlist the services of Ms. Laurie Baty, a
program officer with the Commission who is with me, but I may
very well just turn them over to Dr. Burke.
My testimony, by the way, will be within your
ten-minute limit so there should be no problem.
I am, as you said, executive director of the National
Historical Publications and Records Commission, which is better
known by its more easily remembered initials, the NHPRC.
I congratulate the Library of Congress on its
initiative in gathering information on the current state of
American television and video preservation and I certainly
welcome this opportunity to contribute.
The subject is one that has long concerned and in many
ways perplexed my Commission and I will be speaking primarily to
the funding questions--the funding parts of your information
gathering agenda.
Our concern arises from the Commission's mission. When
the Congress created the National Archives in 1934, it also
created the NHPRC. It housed us within the National Archives and
it charged us with promoting nationwide the preservation and
publication of documents of particular importance for
understanding American history.
In time, the Congress began appropriating some funds
from which we could even make grants so that we could do more
than just advocate attention to the source material on which
historical study depends.
For awhile this seemed fairly simple. The NHPRC helped
launch projects to publish the scholarly editions of the papers
of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison, John Adams and Jane Addams
and more recently of Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Luther King,
just to take some examples.
But at the same time, we had some remarkable
revelations. It has dawned on historians that America cannot be
understood simply from the activities of its most exalted leaders
and now it has dawned on us all that even for understanding those
leaders, the best sources are not exclusively what they wrote.
Photographers, film makers, and video broadcasters have
led us to that insight. They have handed historians an
incredible resource--the actual person, the words as delivered,
the unfolding event, all captured in images and most importantly
in moving images.
Tonight's evening news documents contemporary history
at every level. It also supports creation of the visual records
own pedagogical form--the film or television documentary--which
itself has expanded public access to historical insight far
beyond the book, the lecture and the classroom.
What would we not give to have moving images from
earlier times. How stirred we would be if archaeologists in
ancient Rome turned up a canister of filmed reports by Walter
Cronkitus or Daniel Ratheronius on debates in the Roman forum,
spectacles in the Coliseum, Hannibal's crossing the Alps,
Caesar's campaigns in Gaul and the daily concerns, say, of the
ordinary "classical" family. No effort would seem too great to
preserve such an unexpected glimpse of ancient history as it
actually was. So why be careless with the recorded images we are
making of our own history?
Accordingly, the NHPRC long ago, even during the days
of Dr. Burke, recognized the value of television and video
preservation for historical documentation, and we have acted on
that recognition.
In 1987, the NHPRC granted funds to the American Film
Institute's National Center for Film and Video Preservation to
convene a national conference to plan for improving the care of
local television news film collections and providing access to
them.
More than 40 institutions, I understand, with
collections of newsfilm sent representatives to this conference,
the published proceedings of which expanded attention to news
film collections and their preservation needs.
In 1991, the NHPRC gave another grant to the National
Center for Film and Video Preservation, this time to help it
create a local television news film curatorial manual. Persons
with responsibility for collections of news film will find much-
needed guidance in this manual for acquiring, organizing,
preserving, cataloging, and providing access to moving-image
materials.
These two projects for the National Center for Film and
Video Preservation have not cost a huge amount of money--less
than $100,000 from the NHPRC. But they have helped the Center
organize attention to the need and then publish guidance for
dealing with it.
Also, the NHPRC has invested nearly a half-million
dollars of its grant funds in 11 projects to preserve collections
of newsfilm and provide access to them in individual
repositories. I am appending a list of those projects to this
testimony, if that is agreeable.
From New York to California, 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.
We are proud of this record, but we recognize that it
is a token. We have had enough money to help a few institutions
save a few runs of newsfilm for posterity out of the millions of
feet of material that television broadcasters produce every
month.
The NHPRC's entire appropriation for grants this year
is just $5,000,000, with which we have to try to meet all kinds
of documentary preservation needs across the entire nation.
We are grateful to have even that much, but for
perspective, please consider this. The published accounts of the
production costs of Oliver Stone's latest historical film
indicate that NHPRC's grant budget this year could have financed
little more than 20 minutes of it and the entire cost was equal
to our appropriations total for the last eight years.
Our era in history is the first that is able to
document itself in moving images recorded as words were spoken
and events occurred, but there is far more videotape and news
film than there is money for their preservation. When an agency
with resources no larger than the NHPRC's is a leading funder of
moving image preservation, the limitations come clearly into
view. Obviously we must press the argument for increasing the
financing and I hope my remarks will be useful for that purpose.
But at the same time we must consider rigorously how we
can use more meaningfully the funds we have, and I am not just
talking about squeezing efficiencies out of projects. At the
NHPRC, we are proud of our grant program processes. In
evaluation applications for grants for video preservation and
access, we judge the relative historical value of the collections
to be preserved and the competence of the applicant institutions,
and we fund as many projects as we can that score high on those
tests. But we are asking ourselves a lot of questions. What
material does not come into institutional collections whose
directors write grant proposals? What are we missing? How much
film and videotape of value is being destroyed or lost for future
use while we are doing what we can to save a little? Is it
possible to devise a documentary strategy for news film
preservation of a kind that people are experimenting with in some
other areas? What can we do to assure the people of this nation
something more than a haphazard visual record of its remarkable
history?
These are questions with which the Commission itself
currently is struggling, and they need collaborative attention if
we are to do anything more than request additional funding.
That is my view of where things stand, and I thank you
for the opportunity to contribute to your study. More than
anything else, besides attention to the real funding needs, I
think we also need to work out some means, some set of
priorities, some collectively agreed upon standards for being
sure that what we do preserve is what in fact is the most useful
and most important with the very small resources that I have
indicated we have.
The National Historical Publications and Records
Commission will welcome opportunities to work on this problem
with the Library of Congress and any other organization concerned
with saving the nation's irreplaceable cultural resources. We
look forward to the outcome of the deliberations on which you are
embarked. Thank you very much.
MR. TABB: Thank you, Jerry. Mr. Stevens?
STATEMENT OF GEORGE STEVENS, JR., INDEPENDENT PRODUCER
MR. STEVENS: Thank you. I come here as a film maker,
writer, producer and director and a friend of the work that the
Library has been doing both in the field of motion picture
preservation and now this new initiative in television.
When I was a young man in Hollywood cutting my teeth in
the film world, there were few opportunities to see the films of
the past. The studios that produced the films felt that what had
gone before was past and all attention was paid to producing the
hit pictures for the present.
The result was that the movies made during the first 50
years of the film industry were ignored. A majority of them were
allowed to deteriorate in vaults or were melted down to recover
the silver content of the negatives.
When I had the opportunity to start the American Film
Institute in 1967, we made motion picture preservation our first
priority. Though there were many films that we would never be
able to find and others that were too deteriorated to preserve,
we were successful in rallying a vanguard to the idea of rescuing
and conserving our motion picture heritage and preserving films
that otherwise would have been lost.
Among the legacies of that beginning are the over
20,000 feature films in the AFI collection in the Library of
Congress and, equally important, the national awareness that the
art and history that exists on motion picture film are essential
aspects of the country's intellectual treasure and cultural
heritage.
It became apparent to me during our work on film
preservation in the early 1970's that there was another sphere of
American creativity and communication that was beginning to be
lost in the same way as the early motion pictures.
Television, which had taken its place on the American
stage and was to a large degree eclipsing movie going as a
pastime, was becoming a unique and primary record of our times
and what the historian, Eric Barnouw, likened to "America's
central nervous system."
But television was plunging forward with hardly any
concern for the fact that it was also a large part of the
historical record of our times.
We set out in 1975 to try to bring together the
networks, producers and other institutions in a collaborative
effort to focus on the preservation of our television heritage.
While that initiative called attention to the problem,
there was little interest from government agencies, foundations
and the industry. So today we really face a problem that has
grown through the years.
When Bill Murphy invited me to testify at these
hearings he told me that he had uncovered an article that I had
written for the Washington Post in 1975. Fortunately the article was published on paper. I am
certain that if it had been recorded on video it would have been
lost in the intervening 21 years.
Mr. Murphy sent me the article in which I went on at
greater length than I intend to today (three cheers for good
judgment that comes with age) describing the horror stories of
lost programs and the peril that continued inattention to saving
and preserving television broadcasts would bring.
The article noted, for example, that by 1975 NBC had
retained and catalogued 17,799 hours of programming, which was
about seven percent of its total programming. 107,835 hours of
NBC programming were listed simply as not retained.
From that day to this, a span of 21 years, the networks
and stations have each day been producing programs and one
suspects not doing much better in preserving them, particularly
since the last decade has been a period of downsizing that caused
considerable reduction of staff and infrastructure at the major
networks.
During the years when the AFI, the Library of Congress,
George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art served as a
public interest consortium working to preserve our motion picture
heritage, it is not an exaggeration to say we were viewed, at
best, as a nuisance and, at worst, with hostility by the film
studios whose motion pictures we were working to preserve.
That situation has much improved today. Most of the
studios have created special vaults for storing their films and
are instituting preservation standards and procedures.
Unfortunately, this awakening to the value and
importance of the films they own came too late to save many of
the finest motion pictures ever made.
I believe it is important to understand how this change
in attitude at the major studios came about. The job description
of the individuals now in charge of preservation is revealing.
They are not given the traditional title of archivist. They are
designated vice-presidents in charge of asset management.
The change in attitude came only when the studio owners
realized that these old films that the public archives had been
working to preserve for several decades had, with the arrival of
home video, become assets.
I make this point because I believe television
preservation is going to present a new set of problems. So much
of the television material that must be saved is in the area of
news and recorded history and I do not believe that the nightly
news or the coverage of the Vietnam War or the advances in
American science will ever have the asset value comparable to
Casablanca or Singin' in the Rain.
The volume of existing material which needs to be
preserved is staggering. The cost of preserving it will be great
and each day and each year new material of value is being
created.
So it seems to me that the admirable effort that
Dr. Billington and the Library have undertaken will require
special gifts of persuasion and organization. There can be no
question that it is in the national interest for the view of our
times as seen on television to be preserved.
When thinking about conserving that which is timeless,
it seems sensible to look to the wisdom of the ancients. It was
Cicero who said, "History is the witness of the times, the torch
of the truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the
messenger of antiquity."
Witness, memory, teacher and messenger, television is
all of those things. Failure to preserve it will deny future
generations of Americans vital legacy.
Preserving it will be a formidable task and it will
require leadership at the national level at a time when national
leadership is questioned, when the argument is to make all things
local.
This is one example where national leadership must be
the driving force to encourage the other institutions across the
country to do what is necessary for the public good.
I salute the Library for its leadership. I of course
pledge my cooperation and urge all institutions to collaborate in
this most significant task. Thanks very much.
MR. TABB: Thank you. Question, David?
MR. BURKE: For Jerry George. The two major projects
that you talked about were the grant for a plan given to the
American Film Institute's National Center Film and Video
Preservation and the curatorial manual.
As opposed to the other kinds of grants which are
parcelling out small funds here and there for the preservation of
local network material or local television materials at separate
institutions, do you see the national role more one of
stimulating bringing people together and planning and programming
so that it can be carried out, rather than providing funds on
individual preservation bases when there are so many of those
projects that could be done?
MR. GEORGE: The answer to that is, yes, for both
policy and pragmatic reasons. With appropriations at the level
that ours have been, vis-a-vis the problems with which we are
trying to help, advocacy must be a major part of the Commission's
activity; bringing people together to try to solve problems for
the field as a whole must be part of the activity. Making
accessible nationwide the fruits of the products that we do fund,
that is to say things that can be used by others, must be a major
part of our activity, yes.
We do a great deal of that in the archival field in
particular, and the two grants that you mentioned are
representative of that.
MR. BURKE: Is that a pattern that you think that other
government agencies or other government funding units should
follow?
MR. GEORGE: Well, yes and no. The National Endowment
for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, some of
the other federal agencies that have programs in conservation of
cultural resources or preservation of cultural resources should
help to the extent that they have sufficient funds to help
specific projects. I mean those funds are needed if we are going
to preserve anything.
But I think with our Commission in particular, given
the Congressional mandate that as you know we were given to
promote this kind of activity, as well as to make grants in
support of it, we have a special role there, to look out for
documentary preservation as a whole, and to encourage, promote,
and advocate the attention of others, as well as ourselves, to
these needs.
What other agencies will do in the reduced circumstance
that many of them are facing, I do not know. In our own case,
however many dollars we have, we also have a Congressional
mandate to advocate and to help the field bring itself together
around these problems and that is what we will continue to do.
MR. BURKE: Thank you.
MR. FRANCIS: Throughout these hearings we have heard
particular concern expressed about local news film archives. As
it is almost ten years since the Madison Conference you funded, I
wondered whether you would consider the idea of funding another
meeting, to take up the matter you raised about a strategy for
newsfilm preservation.
If we could parcel off a small part of the problem and
ask for the assistance of an organization like yours, it would be
extremely helpful.
I do not know whether you feel that is something that
would fit within your terms of reference, but I think it would be
extremely useful.
MR. GEORGE: Well, there is no question about it that
we would be interested. I say that in hope of Commissioner
Tabb's blessing on that rather firm pronouncement, but I think I
may say that safely, because the NHPRC makes its grants in
accordance with the strategic plan that we implemented some three
years ago, which sets forth categories by priority of what we
want to fund and what we want to help bring about. Within that
strategic plan, one of its objectives is to attempt to form or
assist collaborative endeavors to deal with some of these issues.
If someone were to put together a very strong grant
proposal to try to establish priorities for newsfilm preservation
or work out a documentary strategy for that purpose with which a
number of others were agreed, we would be most interested in that
kind of proposal. The sooner it comes the better, given the
vagaries of the funding situation, but yes, we would be
interested.
MS. RINGER: Let me make a few personal remarks to
begin with. I cannot tell you how gratified I am to see this
initiative being taken in the Library, even if it is 20 years
late.
I have felt exactly the way you all obviously feel for
many, many years. As a staff member of the Library of Congress,
I was aware that the policies and practices here in the 1960's
and 1970's, when the problem of television news archives was
beginning to come to a boil, were hit or miss. Acquisition
policies were largely based on copyright deposits and were a very
hodgepodge business.
An opportunity arose when the big revision of the
copyright law was going through in the mid-1970's. Because of
the Vanderbilt litigation and Senator Baker's interest in it,
there was a way to open the door for the Library of Congress to
develop a national archive. It is amazing to me the hostility
that produced here and elsewhere.
The Congressional mandate was there, but the
implementation did not get off the ground. I was aware of the
institutional hostility and I had other things to do. I did not
try to push it that hard, because I could not. It was just not
possible.
But I was aware that sooner or later the tape would
come around again and people would realize the opportunity they
were missing and try to do something about it. It is a pity that
we are encountering this new positive attitude now, at a time
when we do not have any money.
Has there been any thought of private funding, major
private funding, by foundations, individuals and corporations?
I know there is no such thing as a free lunch in this. If people
give you money they want something in return. That is human
nature. But, nevertheless, is there any major current activity
to find funding sources?
MR. GEORGE: Well, Mr. Stevens may be able to speak to
that more effectively.
MS. RINGER: I am asking my question to both of you.
MR. GEORGE: This would be my response. Within the
Commission, with our grants, we made a calculation recently that
told us that for every dollar, every federal dollar we spend on
the projects we support, there are two other dollars from other
sources in their budgets and most of those are private dollars.
The grant applicants who come to us frequently show, and in fact
we look for this and encourage this, that they have approached
private sources and are trying to build their budgets in that
way. That makes a great deal of difference to us, because if we
can co-fund a project, that gets more mileage out of our own few dollars.
But you know, I think, as well as I do, that this is a
very difficult time for private sector fund raising, as well, if
only because of the volume of the number of institutions there of
all kinds that are turning to private corporations and
foundations for support, and in part because of their losing
funds from public revenue sources.
So the competition there is fierce as well as for our
dollars. Whether we have adequately tapped the possibilities for
private sector funding in this area, I do not know, but I do know
that while I would certainly encourage efforts to do more private
sector fund raising, I am also keenly aware that there are limits
to what can be expected.
That again is what brings me back to recommending to
you the consideration of some kind of documentary strategy in
this area as in others, because however much additional funds we
are able to generate from whatever sources, they are not going to
be enough to save all the collections that people would like to
save.
Mr. Stevens may wish to speak to private funding. I do
not know.
MR. STEVENS: Well, maybe not that, but I think that
word "strategy," which David picked up which you advanced and
David Francis picked up on is so important.
I think the Library is doing exactly the right thing.
I think this process of calling all of these institutions, giving
them an opportunity to testify, which in turn causes them to
assess when they are doing, to create an awareness within the
community that is concerned or should be concerned with this
activity.
I think it is exactly the right thing to do and I think
the key beyond that is persistence. I think that if you can set
a mechanism where something will happen every six months or every
year that it reminds people of this obligation and the importance
of it.
I think gradually the good work will be done.
Obviously, the idea would be sweeping funding and to apply it and
systematically get all of this done, but that will not happen and
failing that, I think individual and institutional initiative.
David Francis and I were talking earlier about the
motion picture preservation and just to speak briefly of it, I
realize that while during the time I was running the American
Film Institute and we were concerning ourselves with the great
films and the lost films of the teens, 20's, 30's, 40's, it never
occurred to me that at the very time I was doing that, the
classics that my father had made in the 50's and 60's were going
to deteriorate.
I set off some alarm bells a few years ago when I
testified here and said that the negative to A Place in the Sun
had been lost. Paramount got up in arms.
I must say in the intervening two years, I told Sherry
Lansing, who is the chairman of Paramount, about it and she said,
"We will do everything possible to preserve A Place in the Sun--
and they are doing it. They are spending a lot of money on it.
What I am leading towards is I think that there is an
aspect of this that individual producers, directors, creators
should be encouraged to watch out for their own films.
I think they should be brought into your councils and
reminded, because I now realize as I am working on my father's
films and films that I have made that are at these companies, I
realize that they are not quite sure where those are and they are
only 12, 14 years old.
I think one new idea is to encourage individuals to
understand that it is part of their responsibility to find out
where their films are. In that line, I would just say that most
of us who make films do not think that way, because we have not
had the experience.
It does not occur to us. That we are moving along
doing the next one. We have just done our 24th American Film
Institute Life Achievement Award show and we did our 18th Kennedy
Center Honors.
I mean the case of the Kennedy Center Honors, I know I
am the only one who knows where the tapes are and they are only
preserved because I ask the question every couple of years.
Where are these things? What quality are they? Have we
transferred the early ones to the standard?
That is just a suggestion that individuals be
encouraged and informed and brought into this.
MR. FRANCIS: I want to follow up on that. I wonder
whether, if we worked together, we could look at the television
programs you have produced and see how well they have been
preserved. The results could form an appendix to the report. It
could be a model for others to follow.
I do not know whether you would be agreeable to that.
It would be a very powerful addition to the report.
MR. STEVENS: David, at the risk of great personal
embarrassment, when we discovered that what I have said is not
true, I would welcome it. We should be happy to do that. You
just tell me how we need to proceed.
MR. TABB: All right. Thank you very much. We
appreciate your testimony.
I will invite to the table the next group of panelists,
our educators. Before I invite the panelists of this group to
begin speaking, I would like to take one moment to introduce a
very distinguished member of our audience.
Mr. Bob Saudek, the former chief of the Motion Picture,
Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division and a distinguished
pioneer of the industry that we are hearing so much about today.
Bob, we are very glad to see you and glad that you joined us
today. All right. Let's begin with Mr. Culbert.
STATEMENT OF DAVID CULBERT, INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR MEDIA
AND HISTORY (IAMHIST), EDITOR HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO
AND TELEVISION, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY,
BATON ROUGE
MR. CULBERT: I would say that the issue for the
preservation of television video is much more acute than the
issue for the preservation of film and I think this point has
already been underscored.
I was re-reading the testimony from the 1993 hearings
before coming up here and my colleague and friend, Doug Gomery,
made that very point even while testifying about film.
Preservation of television is a more acute problem.
I am very concerned about the disappearance of local
television news, as well as issues of access, but I thought it
also would be helpful to underscore, for example, the
difficulties encountered in scholarly use of television and video
materials.
The historical profession we historians know is acutely
conservative. It is my understanding that situation in the
United States is not different in the United Kingdom and is not
different in Germany. The historical profession for the most
part is not dominated by persons whose central research interests
have to do with the mass media; scholarly preferment goes
primarily to persons publishing books in areas that do not in
fact make the issue of mass media a central concern.
The journal which I edit, the Historical Journal of
Film, Radio and Television, opens its pages to those who wish to
be published without payment, the same pay that brings me here to
these hearings (I will be getting my Greyhound bus ticket back
home in just a few hours.).
The fact is that of submissions to that journal, if I
may add statistical precision to what is primarily a seat-of-the-
pants estimate, I would say 70% of the submissions which I
receive have as the subject of inquiry film, 20% television, and
10% radio, that 10% being perhaps adjusted upwards.
The fact is that television is not being studied in an
important way by scholars who ought to include it in writing
about topics that deal with the 20th century. For television,
let us say from 1950 on, scholars are not making use of video
materials in their writing, or if they do, they are relying on
print summaries, which all-too-often are by persons writing for
style sections offering impressions of these programs.
A book which deals centrally with media-related issues,
saying nothing about the visual part of video materials, may very
well receive splendid reviews by those who do not believe that it
is important for a book dealing with television or the impact of
television on political decision-making to analyze the visual
component of visual materials.
I would suggest that in giving thought to what needs to
be preserved, it would be very useful to study, shall we say, the
footnotes in the scholarly apparatus of scholars who have in fact
made use of video materials in their research.
Now to the issue of funding. I remember Jim Billington
indicating that everyone was in favor of film preservation in the
1993 hearings, but who is to pay for it. The opening of a West
Coast Museum of Television and Broadcasting suggests, not
surprisingly, that though it is always hard to shake a buck out
of someone, some persons can do this, even if the funding of a
fine building is always easier than finding funding for other
things. To those who suggest that there is no money in the
private sector it seems to me the answer is that an expensive
building was just put up.
I would suggest that since people like to have things
named after them, I do not see why it is inherently impossible
not to consider naming someone who is providing substantial
funding for the preservation and transfer of video; perhaps each
cassette should have on it "given thanks to the support of."
It is not true that it is impossible to get funding for
video preservation, but I think we all agree that it is easier to
find funding to put up a building, though that is hard, than
funding for preservation.
The issue of access is not being effectively dealt with
in my opinion by the industry itself. I am talking about access
for scholars who could take the pledge: I would like to be rich
if I knew how, but I ended up in the world of scholarship because
I do not know how to get rich.
Years ago, when CBS was riding high, it had an
imperious, oft-iterated slogan, "CBS does not sell the face or
voice of a network commentator." Well, now it will. Bill Murphy
alerted me to this welcome change from the good old days. I
decided to spend my money as an educator so I faxed CBS archvist
Doug McKinney to see if I could get something that I need for
classroom use.
Back indeed came a fax saying that CBS would sell me,
since I had provided the name of the program and the exact date,
a CBS program for classroom use only.
The cost would be $100 an hour; I should prepay $207
using a credit card and the material could not be returned for
any reason whatsoever and it would take six weeks.
I am happy to say that they got the material to me
promptly, but there are not very many persons, myself included,
who would regularly spend what might seem to someone as a very
small sum, but not to a person who feels that the purchase of
video materials on the home video market at $9.95 or $19.95 for
things that people use in classrooms is a reasonable sum. $100
an hour without knowledge of what one is getting would suggest
that CBS considers scholarly access a profit-making operation.
My next concern is the issue of frame enlargements and
stills and I am very concerned about this. My proposal would be
that the American Radio and Television Act be amended so as to
provide scholarly use and reproduction of frame enlargements and
stills for video as well as for film.
I have been interested in this subject and it seems
very clear to me that no one is prepared to be the test case and
instead we are here dealing with what I would characterize as
government inertia.
I am not at all satisfied with the explanation that
this is an area that is in doubt and we do not know. I have
brought with me and thought I would submit to you examples of the
technological problems involved in making frame enlargements.
For video, particularly in dealing with copies that may be made
from poor-quality video cassettes, the technical capacity of the
reproduction of a freeze frame image is such that it is sometimes
almost impossible, using the best technology, to get an image
that is of sufficient quality to meet the standards of a large
press's art department.
I have in the journal in which I edit been very keen to
accepting articles about television and have in fact found that
video frame enlargements can be used and that they are
sufficiently clear so that one can see the image.
Now the matter of permissions from Hollywood studios.
I have brought with me an example of what I consider to be a
rather rapacious standard contract provided by 20th Century Fox.
I thought 20th Century Wolf might be a better description.
Someone has dreamed up a standard contract which made me an offer
I could refuse.
Since nobody knows whether frame enlargements and/or
stills can or cannot be used without written permission, 20th
Century Fox says when in doubt hit them for all you can get.
With this contract I conclude my remarks. "The
licensee may not use the stills on the cover." In the section
for releases, "written releases from all individuals whose
likenesses or performances are contained in the stills" are
required. All persons. How about a crowd scene?
"Written releases from any unions or guilds, to the
extent required under applicable collective bargaining
agreements" are required in connection with the use of the
stills.
Poor Professor X has to ascertain whether these
bargaining arrangements are or are not applicable. You can
imagine that the union, hard up for money these days, will want
its own fee and a censorship clause.
"The publication shall not be derogatory to or critical
of the entertainment industry or of Fox or any officer, director,
agent, employee, affiliate, parent or subsidiary of Fox or of any
motion picture produced or distributed by Fox and the stills will
not be used in a manner which would be derogatory to or critical
of the motion picture from which the stills were taken or to the
persons involved with the making of the motion picture from which
the stills were taken."
It is certainly an invitation, shall we say, to an
appreciative approach to the history of the entertainment history
in America, but it is preposterous.
The situation is very clear. It is unclear. There is
no clear sense of what constitutes fair use. There is no
consensus amongst publishers. I brought with me examples that I
thought I should at least leave anonymous, lest the publishers
ride me out of town on a rail for naming names, but I happen to
have these names and have the documents.
This lack of consensus is not based on hearsay. Press
X says, you may use frame enlargements, but not stills, without
permission from the copyright holder. Press Y says, you may use
stills, but not frame enlargements. Press Z, one that I have
worked with and others at this table have worked with, says if
you do not have everything in triplicate, you cannot use
anything.
I submit to you that this is a very serious brake on
our conservative historical profession's analysis of a visual
medium. When you make it so incredibly difficult to even think
about reproducing a video enlargement you effectively leave a
visual medium consigned to a position in which the visual can
only be described in words, if that. Thanks to the technical
limitations of video frame enlargements, the visual almost never
appears in the writing about television. Historians must have
fair use of video frame enlargements, and film frame enlargements
in writing about film and television. The Copyright Act must be
clarified by the federal government. That is more than ten
minutes.
MR. TABB: Thank you very much. Mr. Gomery, welcome back.
STATEMENT OF DOUGLAS GOMERY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE
PARK, PROFESSOR, COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM
MR. GOMERY: Thank you. I will try to do less than ten
minutes, although I know we academics are programmed for 50
minutes. So this will require everything that I can summon up.
In that spirit, I will not read. I will try to make my
couple of points. Just to start with, I want to agree in a
general yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We are losing things as we
speak faster than they can be saved.
Yes, frame enlargement is absolutely a very important
position. I once worked on a book on Disney in which there is no
reproductions of a Disney film or television show, because Disney
would not sign off on the condition that we "had something
derogatory to say about them".
We should save the news absolutely. I think the
general point which is very, very important is that and I am very
sympathetic with 20th Century Fox. These are profit centers.
These are profit making corporations.
They are not in the business of archival work nor do
they pretend to be. That is an ancillary product of what they
do.
So with those yes's, I want to make just two larger
points. I know my colleagues are going to eloquently say I think
things that are very important so I would like to say things that
I think are over arching and I suppose to the public would be
what old fuddy duddy tenure professors can say and get away with
and raise that others will not, because they feel they are
running a journal or doing something else. This is what my
mother told me tenure was for.
I think we should try to save everything. I think one
of the things that worries me a lot is this whole value system.
The value system is, we are all familiar with it, hierarchy one
is historical figures in the news.
If I had a reproduction of Napoleon, would it not be
wonderful? That is what I call it. I think that is really to
short for future.
To try to shock the group here, I agree with Newt
Gingrich, a former professor, when he says we ought to worry a
lot about what we present to future generations. I think that
this is not saving the budget for future generations. This is
passing them a cultural legacy that if we erase it, it is not
there.
So it is very, very important and I think it is very
important that we do not lose sight of values of what is
important. I was struck writing this testimony you think about
how much struggle I had getting into the Vermeer exhibit.
Now if you go back and study Vermeer's life, you
understand that we do not even know how many paintings Vermeer
produced in his life. There is a wonderful book in which they
estimate 57.3.
While we have a certain number that we know and they
did a wonderful job collecting those together, but we do not even
know what was left. My imagination was, would it not be
wonderful if the Dutch had had a preservation program back when
Vermeer died or the guilds or the unions or somebody had said,
maybe we should save some of this stuff.
This guy Vermeer is not important now, but maybe in a
few hundred years people will line up around the block and bribe
their Congressmen to get in and push and shove, et cetera, et
cetera.
So, I think we should be very careful of what we think
is valuable to pass on to future generations. One of my current
obsessions is Patsy Cline. Someone who falls far lower in the
value structure than news, et cetera, et cetera, but Patsy Cline
is the largest selling female recording artist for country music
in history.
Her greatest hits album is selling now at 750,000
copies per year. She has been dead for 33 years. People are
going in basements trying to discovery stuff. Well, Patsy Cline
was on Washington, D.C. television every week, every Saturday
night for a year and a half.
Do we have any record of that? Absolutely not. Zero.
So the same way that poor Vermeer may have painted masterpieces
that we will never know about because they were not saved and
were scattered about and not valued at the time, Vermeer did not
paint famous people, Vermeer did not paint what we considered to
be important subjects.
He had painted streets and little subjects and rooms.
My favorite, the Milkmaid, a person pouring milk. I mean that is
not going to make a lot of money. That is not a valued subject
in his day and of course it disappeared.
Why should we expect it? Patsy Cline has disappeared,
too. So what do we say to the public who buys her album? One
out of every nine households in the United States has a Patsy
Cline album. What do we say to that public?
Would it not be nice that we had some visual record of
what she actually performed like? Well, unfortunately we do not.
The same in Washington, D.C. TV as for Walter Cronkite and
others.
On an absolutely personal note, I interviewed Bob
Dalton who has been on Washington TV for 30 years recently and
Bob Dalton has the sum of his lifetime work, 30 years on American
television, daily journalism in nine videotapes sitting on his
couch. Nine.
I said, Bob, is this it? He said, yes, this is it.
Eight were from the 1990's. One videotape from 1952 to 1990.
That is unconscionable.
So first big point by the tenured professor is do not
think small. Please do not think small. Do not give the values
of our generation to our children and our grandchildren and their
great grandchildren. Please do not do that.
I know money is tight. I know things are hard. I know
it is difficult. Life is difficult, but I think if we narrow it
now, they will never have it. We lose, if you want a fancy term
what the economists call option value.
If we destroyed Yellowstone Park in 1916, we would not
have the option of having it generation after generation and that
brings me to my second point. Money.
I am a trained economist. So I try to think about
this. I proposed several years ago a one-percent tax on all
movies. Movie tickets, movie rentals, et cetera. Five hundred
million dollars a year.
Yes. That would go a long way in solving the problem,
but I got poo-pooed. The press ran things about it. This is
the dumbest idea we have ever heard. Obviously this guy is a
professor. How did he ever get tenure, et cetera.
Well, I recently heard an example and I thank the news
for bringing it up. The Everglades. The Everglades are a great
natural resource that we have in this country. A park that is
being destroyed and the nature groups that are destroying it and
my apologies to them, are the sugar producers.
They want good land. This is terrific virgin
territory, near water, et cetera. So the sugar producers have
been, if you go in south Florida, encroaching from Lake
Okeechobee down further and further.
Well, a deal has been struck. The Everglades need
money to be saved. So we now have a one cent a pound tax on
sugar. Now of course you can hear the screaming and yelling by
the sugar industry.
This is going to kill us. We have no profits. It is
the end of sugar as we know it. All I ask is a test case. Has
anyone in this room noticed a difference in the price of sugar?
Have you bought less sugar for your coffee? Have you bought less
pies? Have you noticed an escalation?
No, of course not. One cent on a pound has not changed
anyone's behavior, but hopefully it will provide the financial
basis for preserving the Everglades. Those who use it, the sugar
producers and us the consumers, should help keep it as a public
good. I think the exact analogy goes here.
If we want to pass this to our grandchildren and great
grandchildren as a public service, as a public good, a cultural
product, then we all ought to be willing to contribute.
I do not measure video in pounds, but if you want to
use feet, if you want to use one percent, a half a percent, I
think you come up with a similar model, a model of preserving
that material as a public good for all of us now and in the
future.
I would encourage that we think big on those lines so
that we can have not only the amount of funding necessary, but
the steady state of funding that is necessary, not just hit and
miss, but steady.
Thank you very much.
MR. TABB: Mr. Cripps, good to see you again as well.
STATEMENT OF THOMAS CRIPPS,
MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY, PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
MR. CRIPPS: Thank you. For our next tenured fuddy
duddy professor, I think I will take my allotted time or less. I
am not sure.
I have a long paragraph I am skipping, in which I
explain to us all why we are here and why I am personally here.
I will skip both of those.
I should like to be thought of as a delegate from
another world, that is of the small college struggling to be a
university in a world of giants.
The Morgan State Universities in the world number in
the thousands. They graduate most of the students of higher
education in the United States, particularly in the case of
Morgan and HBU, as we say on the campus, historically black
university.
This statistic has meaning. HB's have graduated a far
higher proportion of America's black leaders than have the
traditionally white universities and yet we struggle in a way
that larger, research oriented universities do not.
Our libraries, when compared with major libraries, grow
at an inch worm rate. Especially this is so with respect to
costly electronic images, whether radio, television, motion
pictures, laser discs, CD rom materials.
Not only are these materials prohibitively costly, but
their storage, maintenance and accessibility render the need for
their acquisition almost moot.
Ranging from buying machinery, monitors, players, VCR's
and such, to buying licenses to take new materials off satellite
place small libraries in a perpetual survival mode.
Thus our collections remain small and relatively
speaking grow smaller and so our distance from the mainstreams of
American intellectual life remains the subject of a constant
struggle.
Almost no predominantly African-American university can
expect to stay even in this uneven struggle. My own university,
when I arrived 37 years ago, was blessed by Guggenheim Fellows
such as Benjamin Quarles, distinguished journalists such as G.
James Fleming and pioneers in bringing black American life into
the American studies and internationally regarded literary
critics such as Philip Butcher and Nick Ford. Now we have
perhaps one or two dinosaurs left.
Partly this is so because the nature of the curriculum
has changed in ways that render electronic media obligatory as
sources of study and of teaching.
When I was a graduate student in olden times, as my
students think of it, a professor once quoted with quiet approval
a famous historian who had asserted that history is past
politics.
Now politics has been subsumed under rubrics such as
cultural studies. This means that to study any trait of 20th
century American culture in society has become for some scholars
a search for politics. Politics of art, of movies, of
television.
This curricular evolution alone has made both teaching
and research prohibitively dear. Susan Davis' book, Parades and
Power, a recent study of 19th century Philadelphia working class
politics combined, even indeed linked popular forms of parading
on holidays as manifestations of political campaigning.
Her entire corpus of research might have been
accomplished in one or two libraries by turning the pages of old
newspapers. To attempt the same task in the age of television is
to incur a research debt that would be unavoidably dependent on
research and travel grants that would be prohibitive to graduate
students and undergraduates alike.
So with a simultaneous arrival of both cultural studies
and electronic media, the teacher and the student both at a small
American college are effectively debarred from participating in
any important trend in American higher education.
The solution to this emerging disparity is access to
electronic resources and of course self evidently the
preservation of these videotape documents.
Others will argue far more effectively than I for such
a hoped for outcome of these hearings. My most deeply felt need
is for access to the preserved document.
At the very least, the ongoing work of the Library of
Congress, Division of Broadcasting, Motion Pictures and Recorded
Sounds must be encouraged and expanded, perhaps in the form of
regional core collections of their documents.
In addition, in keeping with the laws expressed wish to
enhance education while ensuring against copyright infringement,
we must ask for a re-clarification of the copyright law of 1976,
coincidentally written in the same year as the television
preservation law.
If we clarify copyright law in a way that it does not
infringe upon the rights of copyright holders, it should allow
for educational use as fair use. Perhaps by having institutions
pay a general user fee, not unlike that paid to ASCAP for the
right to use musical compositions.
In this way researchers, even undergraduate
researchers, would be able to receive on request of the Library
of Congress or other repository, either by satellite or by postal
service research and teaching copies of historic video documents.
Perhaps copyright holders could have a small logo
supered in the corner of the frame of such programming as an
insurance against an unintended pirated use for broadcast
purposes.
Many firms in the business of selling stock shots
already do this. Or a more commonplace solution might be the
often discussed prospect of regional media study centers. There
are already such precedents for this in the Pacific Film Archive,
the late lamented Southwestern Film and Video Archive, the
Harvard and Yale Archives, along with many smaller archives that
have taken in the news footage of their local television
stations, such as the University of Baltimore and the University
of Maryland, Baltimore County.
To take any one of these steps, accompanied by a
rigorous national effort to preserve the nation's television
heritage, much has already been undertaken.
It will allow the nation's small institutions to share
in an academic culture now accessible only to those universities
rich enough to collect their own archives. Those near to the
major repositories, such as the Library of Congress and those who
now scrape by even as they are partly daunted by the FBI's
warnings at the top of every Blockbuster tape that they use
fragment of in class.
My students frequently play a verbal dramatized joke in
class, each one thinking he or she has invented it, bursting in
the door, pretending to be the FBI and having us put our hands
against the wall.
Many witnesses before this body will surely emphasize
the documented need for preservation and broad access without
violating copyright, but I would press further a more precious
need that practicing scholars cannot do without.
The development of the provenance and the pedigrees of
the video image. To rely on collectors, commercial stores such
as Blockbuster or even their more historically minded
counterparts, such as Video Americain, is to study documents that
have frequently been violated, edited, fragmented and otherwise
spoiled as pristine primary sources.
To have a national repository such as the Library of
Congress with a staff trained in librarianship would assure not
only the stanching of the bleeding away of lost materials, but
would assure that the survivors would be catalogued according to
a professional standard of description.
Here I should point out that by the television document
I mean precisely what is meant by almost everyone else who might
wish to speak to this issue. All of the programming, not merely
news, documentaries or so-called educational television.
It is all educational, whether the seven-year hit
situation comedy, a flop that has dropped after six shows or the
hundreds of commercials that routinely punctuate the programming.
It is the total television experience that will teach
our offspring what our culture was really like. Imagine if we
were to judge the culture of Britain only by what comes to us
through the prism of Masterpiece Theatre. We would miss entirely
the Irish, the working class, the blacks and so on.
To fail to see this preservation attempt in the round
is to become dependent on compilers of the holdings of copyright
possessors.
However much we were amused by MGM's That's
Entertainment, however we wince at the NFL's compilations of the
league's hardest hits, complete with augmented whacks of sound
effects, we are unable to learn much from them.
Yet we are dependent on what sells, whether in the
rental stores or among the chains of dealers, such as Sun Coast.
May I have one last word on the aspect of our work here
that may elude those of us who have not recently faced its
structures? I wrote this before I heard David talking about
copyright.
That is the subject of copyright. We indeed need some
uniform code or standard that will allow scholarly use without
the threat of litigation for presume violation or infringement.
The law as it stands or rather the jurisprudence that
has followed from it has made eligible for copyright almost any
document, even a laundry list.
That is to say, any scribbling on a page constitutes
intent to publish. Therefore any manuscript or in our instance
today, any out take, constitutes a copyrighted document protected
by the law.
Moreover, this particular title in the law awards
uncommonly ironclad protection to all of the future widows and
orphans of America whose forbears may have produced something
deemed as meant to be published.
We need to remove all non-commercial, scholarly
research or teaching purpose or intent from this morass of ever
lengthier claims to ownership.
We should make clear the intent neither to infringe the
rights of others nor the wish to profit from the work of others,
but the public's right to know as phrased in the original
copyright act of 1790 is also a right and one that we must defend
against infringement. Thank you.
MR. TABB: Thank you. Mr. Curtin, the director of cultural studies programs
at Indiana University.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL CURTIN,
INDIANA UNIVERSITY, DIRECTOR, CULTURAL STUDIES PROGRAM
MR. CURTIN: Good day. Thank you for the invitation to
present here. I have submitted some written comments and rather
than reading from those comments, I just want to touch on some
things that have already been said by some of the scholars here
and by the first round of presentations, amplifying upon them a
little bit and then perhaps offer a modest suggestion, which is
probably just as naive as some of the other suggestions that
scholars will make today.
First of all, as far as budgets are concerned, whether
we are talking about small colleges or "research institutions" we
are talking about very small research budgets.
Mr. Cripps very eloquently pointed out the problems
that scholars confront at small institutions. At Indiana
University, what is known as a world class research institution
or at least likes to pretend that it is a world class research
institution, scholars in the humanities have no research budgets.
You can compete for research budgets. You can try and
negotiate for research budgets and a very handsome annual
research budget might total $1,000, $2,000. So we are talking
about very small amounts of money.
Most of the money that people spend on their research
comes out of their pockets. A lot of this we have sort of
referred to jokingly, but perhaps dark humor is what one is
confronted with in these kinds of circumstances, but we refer to
it as credit card research. We extend our credit limits on our
credit cards in order to be able to go places to gather the
information and materials that are important to us. So as far as
research budgets are concerned, all up and down the scale we are
talking about very limited amounts of money that are available.
The second thing is that Mr. Culbert pointed out that
there is a reticence on the part of some historians to actually
engage in the analysis of television programs themselves, given
the obstacles that they confront. It is very true that for years
television studies pretty much focused on institutional,
regulatory, and economic issues, largely I think because people
did not have VCR's in their homes where they could pop tapes in,
record programs, and then go back and look at them very
carefully.
A lot of the research that was being done was being
done about television as an institutional force and it is only
more recently that we have started to see an increasing interest
in the program texts themselves.
This interest in programs is appearing not just in
history but in cultural studies, which is one of the reasons why
I wanted to appear today. Cultural studies is perhaps one of the
fastest growing areas in humanities research today.
What is cultural studies? Well, it is very much about
the connection between text and context. How is it that the
meanings that we circulate in society are connected to social and
power relations in society? It is not just media scholars who
are interested in this. It is people in English departments,
political science departments, folklore departments, comparative
literature departments, all across the university. My program
includes 60 faculty members from 19 departments and programs in
the university who study everything from cartoons to Ouigi boards
to television, and television is of increasing interest, because
for 40 years more than 80% of the American people have had TV's
in their homes. It is something that we share across
generations. We share it across economic, social, ethnic,
racial, other sorts of divides. How we share it, how we use it
is of course distinctive to each viewing context itself, but
nevertheless it is the preeminent form of mass communication.
Yet what we have here, what we are confronted with, is
a blanking out; a sort of sealing off of a lot of discussion
about this realm and about the texts themselves, largely because
of the issues that we confront in the area of copyright.
You have heard a lot of discussion about this today; I
too consider copyright to be perhaps the paramount issue in
resolving a lot of the problems we confront. Certainly funding,
storage, access, those sorts of things are very important, but
the real irony here is that these programs which are so hard to
access were broadcast over the public airwaves.
Mr. Gomery is very right, we have to be sympathetic
with these private corporations being profit ventures. Indeed
they are profit ventures and that has made only too apparent by
Mr. Stevens' comment that one is known as the vice-president of
asset management; they see themselves as profit ventures
primarily. So their priorities are very, very different, but the
irony here is that as a result their priorities fly in the face
of the fact that here we have a public medium of which we have no
record.
In newspapers we have a record. The next day you can
go to the library and you can look at what was in yesterday's
newspaper and study it very carefully. You could do that of
course for decades. You can get it on microfilm. It can be
circulated to institutions all over the country.
With television, you cannot do that. You do not have
access to those records and if you do not have your tape machine,
your personal tape machine running, chances are you may be
missing something, like the O. J. Simpson flight and trial.
Now granted, however you take that issue, it was a
major media event, which compelled national attention. What
happened with the Simpson flight and trial is probably a
condensation of just about a half dozen very significant issues
that confront us. Everything from domestic relations to race
relations to the future of Los Angeles to police enforcement, et
cetera, et cetera. A very important event and yet we have no way
of legitimately accessing that without going through these
corporate institutions with their own sets of priorities, unless
we want to fly in the face of copyright and make our own
recording, circulate them among ourselves, do this in a very sort
of casual and subrossa manner, which is how a lot of television
research gets conducted.
So what goes over the public airwaves is not available
for critique. It is not available for criticism largely because
of.
Mr. Gomery suggested a 1% tax as one proposal that we
might consider. I would also say that what we should consider as
well is pressing for an exemption to copyright laws for the
Library of Congress: that the Library of Congress be allowed to
record off-air at its own discretion, that it be able to seek
from commercial distributors materials that are not otherwise
commercially available at a reasonable cost and that by gaining
this exemption that they start to undertake a very active program
of systematically trying to record what is happening now on
television and also gathering those things that are difficult to
obtain through commercial sources.
That exemption is not unreasonable. It is not
unreasonable first of all because we are talking about the public
airwaves, but it is also not an unreasonable thing because when
my book was published last year, I know that a copy went to the
Library of Congress. When books are published, they end up in
the Library of Congress, right? Well maybe not in all cases, but
certainly in most cases we know where to look.
With television, we have the most ubiquitous form of
mass communication in the United States and we do not have a
record. We do not have a way to move forward systematically in
gathering that record. Why? Because we depend on the
contributions and generosity of television executives, of
producers. We depend on the occasional collection that gets
donated.
I do not know all of the ways in which collections are
gathered and organized, because that is not my bailiwick, but I
do know that I just recently published a book on the emergence of
television news in the early 1960's as the preeminent form of
news in the United States especially the documentary genre
itself.
I was able to go around the country and I was able to
gather most of the documentaries that I was looking for. Why?
Because nobody considered them to be commercially valuable
anymore, one.
Secondly, they were considered to be public service
kinds of programming so they got distributed to libraries. They
got distributed to archival collections. It was part of a
network public service gesture, the whole documentary boom of the
early 1960's.
Therefore, I could go around the country and gather up
these things and nobody thought they were worth anything. In
fact, I was just ahead of the garbage man in many cases, because
what was happening was that people were discarding from
collections many of these documentaries that I was in fact
studying.
So in that case, I was lucky. If I had not been able
to access those documentaries, I would argue that I would have
written a very, very different book than the book that I wrote,
because one of the things that scholars pay attention to
increasingly is the fact that all forms of media, are
contradictory.
Embedded within them is not one single message, but a
constellation of often conflicting, contradictory meanings and
what I often found in these documentaries were things that were
far different from what I had expected.
The questions I ended up asking as part of my research
project were far different than the questions I started out with
when I started my project looking through government documents,
looking through trade publications, looking through contemporary
press accounts, et cetera.
So this public record is extremely important. What we
know and what we will think of our immediate past and our distant
past is highly reliant on the fact that we start making a
systematic effort to save much of what is there.
I just want to close with one final comment and that is
going back to what Mr. Gomery was saying about priorities.
Inscribed in whatever systematic effort we make will be a certain
set of values. A certain set of assumptions about what we think
is valuable.
Let me just point out that I have a student right now
who is working on a dissertation about cooking shows. It is a
fascinating dissertation: What we think about food. How we
present food. The sorts of discussion and deliberation that goes
on around food. The ways in which cooking is both a public and a
private activity. The ways in which television bridges the
public and the private. The way that it gathers viewers around
the issue of what kinds of foods are to be valued, how they are
prepared, et cetera, et cetera.
Who would have thought of cooking as being a
fascinating dissertation? Yet, this student, who is working on
her dissertation in this area, is now producing I think something
that is going to be very valuable to people in the future when
they look back and they think about how was food inscribed in
social practices during the 1980's and 1990's?
So I very much urge you to consider the sorts of things
that the panelists suggest here. Certainly we do not know all of
the particularities of how these acquisitions will take place,
how they will be funded, et cetera, et cetera, but we can tell
you that it is extremely important what this panel is doing.
We are very grateful for these efforts and we think
that this action needs to move beyond just the question of the
technical issues, the funding issues. It needs to also move into
the realm of dealing with these very confusing copyright
concerns. Thank you.
MR. TABB: Thank you. Now we welcome Thomas Doherty who is chairman of the
film studies program at Brandeis.
STATEMENT OF THOMAS DOHERTY,
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, CHAIR, FILM STUDIES PROGRAM
MR. DOHERTY: Thank you. I am pleased to testify to
the importance of television and video preservation and to
programs that assure scholars, students and the general public
ready access to television archives.
But because I am from Brandeis University I come here
not only to testify, but to kvetch a little about that subject.
Like my colleagues, I believe that the television
legacy no less than printed material or the motion picture record
offers the unique lens into American life in the second half of
the 20th century.
Matthew Arnold to the contrary, culture is no longer
only the best that is written in thought. It is also what we see
and create on screen.
No one outside the provinces of an Amish community can
doubt the centrality of television to American life. Reviled or
beloved, vast wasteland or cultural cornucopia, TV shapes our
imagination and colors our existence.
The values we esteem, the myths that we live by, even
the leaders we elect are transmitted and mediated by television.
Since 1948 or thereabouts successive generations of
Americans have measured their lives by shared moments beheld on
the screen. Just as we experience that shared present through
television, we learn our history through it for history is now as
likely to be acquired as a visual memory, as a printed one, as a
retrieval of images rewound from our collective visual
consciousness.
We can all do the channel surfing in our heads. Frank
Costello's hands nervously fidgeting during the Kefauver crime
hearings, attorney Joseph Welch facing down the junior senator
from Wisconsin, a perspiring Charles Van Doren feigning
concentration, four indelible days in November, 1963, a blizzard
of combat imagery from southeast Asia, the president's men called
to account before the halls of Congress and on and on to the
Challenger disaster, the Hill-Thomas hearings, the war in the
gulf and too long ago, the murder verdict of the century.
In focusing just now on matters of obvious historical
significance however, I did not mean to slight the rest of the
medium's content.
Momentous events aside, our encounter with television
is more likely to be the daily rituals of situation comedies,
talk shows, crime dramas or sports. Yet sometimes the obscure
and the ephemeral persist with surprising tenacity and what seems
the disposable dextrose of one era might be a nugget of gold to
another.
Viewed from a distance, revelations abound in the
common rung of television programming. The racial and ethnic
shadings of 1950's America in Amos and Andy and Molly. The
gender dynamics in any one of a dozen ripe sitcoms from Ozzie and
Harriet to Roseanne and the nation insecurities expressed in
crime melodramas such as Dragnet or NYPD Blue.
In honesty, one might be forced to concede the daunting
possibility that the Jerry Springer show might reveal as much
about the 1990's as 60 Minutes.
In short, though some discrimination is nigh
unavoidable, given the vast quantity of material in the TV
culture bank an open ended selection process might best capture
the wide net and permissive arena that is television, an
admissions policy that accepts all genres and embraces the low
with the high.
After all, we have learned those terms have a way of
turning on their heads with time. As anyone knows who has
partaken of the genius, is there a better word for it, of Lucille
Ball, Jackie Gleason or Ernie Kovacs.
If the defense of television as an art and the
arguments for its impact as a social influence are familiar
enough, it's role in the classroom as a historical document might
be less known.
In this sense I thought it might be useful to discuss
one example of how as a teacher of American history and culture
TV comes into play. Being a cultural historian, I teach courses
in the full range of Americanist material, from the sermons of
John Winthrop on through to the glories of classical Hollywood
cinema.
A couple of years ago I took over a course entitled
"Television in American Culture," given out of the American
studies department at Brandeis.
From the billing at least it might seem to be the kind
of offering designed to give lazy undergraduates a gut and
conservative critics of the academy the conniptions.
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
instant gratification? Surely these are subjects and questions
to be pondered in an undergraduate education.
Yet in mastering the history of television and of
obtaining material for the class, I found myself stymied again
and again. Unlike virtually any other subject one can teach in
which ready access to illustrative material and landmark text is
a given, the television coded and propelled history of America is
maddeningly intangible and un-chronicled.
Further, television moments are just that. Discreet
and irreplaceable pieces of time. If you are teaching say the
Army-McCarthy hearings, the assassination of JFK or the Tet
offensive, access to the contemporaneous images and I would
really like to second what Tom Cripps said, as broadcast at the
time not as re-contextualized and reedited in retrospective
archival documentaries is simply essential.
To be sure, the VCR has helped enormously as has the
proliferation of cable options such as A&E, C-SPAN and the
history channel.
Moreover in my experience, the networks and individual
television producers have been generous in making their materials
available, but let's be real. The networks are businesses whose
main clients are their in-house production teams.
Scholars of the medium naturally fall well outside
their job description. For a specific example, take an event
like the Cuban missile crisis, surely a moment in American
history worth reclaiming in undergraduate classrooms.
An essential part of teaching that moment is JFK's
address on October 22, 1962 in which he used television to
deliver an ultimatum to the Soviets and to inform the American
people of the gravity of the crisis.
It is certainly the most bracing presidential address
ever given on television. We remember it. Our students do not.
Where do you find it unedited in its entirety as it was
delivered? How do you get a copy of it to show to your class?
Moreover, what substitution can you make? Again,
unlike literature where one can choose from a range of likely
books when teaching say the American renaissance or even film
where an individual western, musical or filmed war can stand in
for the genre TV can accept no substitute.
Could you teach the Cuban missile crisis without having
seen JFK's speech and screening it? Maybe, but you cannot teach
it as well, as vividly, as powerfully.
Ironically and despite whatever the future holds for
VHS, which will likely go to the way of the eight track tape with
the onset of the digital video disc, even as videotape has become
an ever more cost efficient and user friendly teaching tool, the
availability of materials to obtain scholarly expertise and
assist pedagogy remains both expensive and elusive.
This is especially true of the landmark broadcast of
the early television era, which were preserved haphazardly on
kinescope, if at all.
In some cases, the visual record of events from 1946 to
1960 may be more clouded and less retrievable than events before
that era, which were preserved on news reel film or after it,
recorded on videotape.
There is another consideration that might be calculated
into the video mix, one that has special resonance for media
historians. Once a fresh insight, it is now a stale cliche to
observe that in an image obsessed world the boundaries between
reality and the image have converged.
That reality, as Susan Sontag put it, "has come to seem
more and more like what we are shown on cameras". Yet even for
Sontag, a critic with a preternatural sense for the next fashion
curve, the photographical reproduction of reality possessed an
unbreakable link to the original.
"The picture distorts", Sontag wrote in 1977, "but
there is always the presumption that something exists, or did
exist, which is like what's in the picture."
That presumption no longer holds. Today the technology
of photo fabrication in videotape and cinema, no less than the
still picture, has out paced the ability of the spectator to
detect it.
The telltale indicators of tampering by which a
discerning eye could always perceive alterations in the
photographic image. The difference in film grain, the visible
lines in air brushing, the mismatch of lighting and background
have been wiped clean by imaging technologies.
Through the magic of seamless matching, morphing,
computer graphics and digital editing techniques, the integrity
and voracity of any moving image, perhaps the whole notion of
documentary cinema has been called into question.
In sum, if the historian's job of work is to evoke and
interpret the past, then television must be part of the material
at hand.
The psychologist Karl Jung remarked that "myth is the
history you don't have to be taught in school." Can anyone doubt
that our modern myth makers are on and around television?
That television is like the atmosphere, sometimes
invigorating, sometimes oppressive, but always there. In a
famous warning, Edward R. Murrow once ruminated on the potential
of television, that it was an appliance that might teach and
illuminate but otherwise it was merely lights and shadows in a
box.
I think we know it is always much more, but whatever it
is, it must be before our eyes to study, to interpret, to delight
in.
As the preeminent custodian of our national heritage,
the Library of Congress should commit itself aggressively to the
task of preserving these vivid and irreplaceable documents. Thank you.
MR. TABB: All right. Thank you. David?
MR. FRANCIS: I hope you do not consider the question I
am going to address to all of you as unfair. Let's look at the
suggestion Doug Gomery raised about keeping everything
effectively.
Say the Library of Congress or other organizations were
in a position to record programs off-air and to protect copyright
by putting time code invision. This would also enable us to
retain information about the date of transmission. Would the
academic community be prepared to make a contribution towards the
cost of the operation?
It is not actually that expensive to record the major
networks off-air. If you divide that cost between all the
academic organizations which have an interest in this material, I
do not think it would be a significant amount. You then
have to find a way of getting that information to the user and
that would involve some form of electronic transmission.
I think it is a feasible proposition. What do you feel
about it? Let us take a figure out of the blue and say it would
cost each institution $50,000 a year for access to this
collection. That would cover the cost of the recording. There
might also be a small charge for each access.
Do you think this is a feasible approach? It might be
possible that we could find a way ensuring adequate protection to
record all programs off-air.
This proposal has the advantage of not only recording
the programs, but the links as well, enabling one to see the
juxtaposition of programs on one channel and another.
MR. CRIPPS: This is already done in the form of off
satellite licenses. So people who make up budgets are already
used to that line in the budgets. I think it would be only a
matter of as the technology advances refining the language of the
contracts.
I think you are right about the small item that that
budget buying would be for each institution. I think that is not
only perfectly reasonable anticipation of the future, but
actually a description of what already goes on.
MR. CURTIN: There is already a significant and growing
amount of library budgets allocated for the acquisition of video
materials and actually one of the advantages here of pursuing
such a thing is that a lot of the materials that are being
gathered are being gathered on the basis of purchasing tapes,
tapes which a lot of times for a half hour, hour tape sometimes
cost $200 for a single tape. Other tapes which are much less
expensive are starting to become available as well.
But some sort of a sharing arrangement, one of the
advantages here is the fact that libraries might then have access
to a larger pool actually than what they have now using a similar
amount of money in their budgets or perhaps even a smaller amount
of money from their budgets.
Given the fact that for example there are tapes that I
have ordered by the library that I might use once or twice a year
and yet we have to purchase the tape in order for me to be able
to use them in the classroom or use them for research.
So I think yes indeed this is a wonderful idea and I
think it would be received quite well by many librarians on the
one hand.
On the other hand, these libraries are facing very,
very severe sorts of funding constraints themselves. So, it has
to be a way of sort of reallocating resources primarily within
already existing budgets as opposed to coming up with new money,
because in many cases new money just does not exist, as you well
know.
MR. TABB: Anyone else want to respond to David's
question?
MR. CULBERT: The only thing I would add is certainly a
problem in my university--very, very modest or antiquated
equipment for classroom use. I could see the idea of a
contribution for a licensing fee, something that in fact would
make sense in the university, but then how to get it into the
classroom. Having students come to a designated room in the
library in a university with 27,000 people would immediately
create a scheduling problem. Fortunately the vast majority of
professors could not care less about this and would never come.
It is not an insurmountable barrier, but it is worth
keeping in mind that it is not just in the eloquence of
Tom Cripps' description of HBU's. There are lots and lots of
places out there where material in the classroom can be a bit of
a challenge because of the simple brake of inadequate equipment
with brake in both senses (break!) of the word.
MR. BURKE: With the importance of television as
presented here eloquently this morning and other media, is there
a rationale for some universities closing down their radio,
television and film departments?
MR. GOMERY: I guess that is aimed at me, but it was
presented to us as a fate complie and so I do not think it was a
good rationale at all nor a good idea. When the votes were
taken, we were not in the room.
MR. BURKE: Is it a trend?
MR. GOMERY: Yes. Sadly it is a trend. The University
of Virginia. The University of Maryland. The University of
Oregon. Arizona State. Ohio State. I could keep the list a
long way down.
As an economist, when the economy went into recession
in 1990, 1991, 1992, particularly this is really pretty much for
state universities, started to look for ways to cut.
One of the things my colleagues have alluded to is the
changing of the nature of the academy, which is as you all know
having been there very, very slow and so the study that media was
often in a humanities program or something else.
When you look at a humanities program, the history
department, my apologies to most history departments, use chalk
and maybe a few slides and et cetera. Then you get down to the
radio and TV film budget, well it was a pretty easy decision to
be made.
But that had nothing to do with the study by the media.
It had to do with the inability to get rid of large dollar
expenditures quickly.
MR. CULBERT: I think part of that too has to do with
another sort of uncertainty. The name radio, TV, film would seem
to many to be sort of an antiquated title. Do you want to call
it mass communications and what do you want to do with it?
The problem at my university has been an uncertainty as
to the cost of buying the constantly evolving technology and the
fact that persons who used to go into a radio, TV, film
department, now updated with at least a new title--if no new
equipment--now attend a School of Mass Communication.
If these are persons who are seeking employment in an
industry, then unless you have extremely up-to-date equipment you
are, shall we say, instructing them in something new, it is
called a typewriter--and then sending them out to try and find
practical employment.
The issue is whether the primary purpose of a radio,
TV, film department is to produce practitioners or to promote the
kinds of interest that I think every panelist here is concerned
about--trying to integrate the study of television into a much,
much wider range of inquiry.
I think in a sense your question, which I see as being
animated by just a whiff of malice, actually is a very
interesting one if a non-malicious but more thoughtful or
reflective response is encouraged.
To measure the impact of the study of television or
video in the academic world based on closings or openings or
budgets of radio, TV, film departments would be an exceedingly
inaccurate mechanism, like using the telephone to find out who
was going to win the presidential election of 1936.
It is hard to get the needed data. Please remember
that an association of professors of journalism or mass
communication is not the way to find out something which nobody
knows and that is what use is being made of television in the
classroom.
I use those same materials Tom Doherty spoke of in the
course that I teach in America since 1945. I am also interested
in complete video texts.
I cannot imagine missing an opportunity to show the
entire Nixon Checkers speech, which I always tell my students is
an opportunity to see one of the very few examples of the
dinosaur age of television production.
I have mass communications majors in that course who
indeed are shocked to see what was state-of-the-art broadcasting
in 1952.
To me not only is the content memorable, but it is the
video technique and the problem of how a camera managed to move
from Dick Nixon with the greatest of effort--it seems to take a
minute to get all the way over to Pat--while also revealing what
was conceived of as a reasonable studio set in 1952.
This is part of the contextualization of a landmark in
American political television. But that is only part of it and
the fact that it is a standard item that might be used in a
course on America since 1945 is never going to be discovered by
asking about budgets for radio, TV, film departments.
MR. BURKE: There is no malice of forethought. I just
wanted to get the issue on the table.
MR. CULBERT: No. It is a very good question though.
MR. DOHERTY: The film studies program there is a new
creation in the last couple of years, because it finally became
intolerable, even to the liberal arts sort of print oriented,
talmudic history of Brandeis that you would have a major
university that did not have a study of the moving image.
It was almost easy in terms of persuading faculty from
other departments that this was overdue when you could point out
that the 20th centuries, the history of the moving image and film
both predates and has outlived the Soviet Union.
That why would you ever want to teach a class on the
second world war without the films of Leni Riefenstahl or Frank
Capra. I do not see how anybody could do that would want to do
that.
From a purely like liberal artsy humanistic basis, even
neglecting the kind of professional departments or mass comm with
more quantitative departments that are popular around the
country.
MR. TABB: Barbara?
MS. RINGER: Just a couple of observations. It must be
obvious to all that we are talking about two things here. One is
preservation--and that is a major, major problem--but the other
is access, and the name of that game is copyright.
I am glad to see that people recognize that. If you've
ever made any effort to try to use these materials in the way you
have all described, you know that copyright is crucial. I have a
lot of experience with that problem.
I agree that copyright is a major stumbling block to
what you want to do and what you should be wanting to do.
Doug Gomery says think big. I agree that is important,
but I think you also have to start small. Brainstorm all you
want--1% taxes, tax credits, or whatever. Thinking about that
sort of thing is fine, but it is not going to happen folks. It
really is not.
I do not see many people here from the proprietary end
of things. Is there anybody here from the copyright owners
exclusively? No. Also, how many lawyers are there in the room?
One.
In 1955 when the copyright revision program started, we
were dealing with a law enacted in 1909--one which was totally
out of date in 1955. It took another 21 years to get the revised
law to the point of being passed.
What Congress passed in 1976 was a pretty good 1950
law. At least it took us up to that point. The guy who was
mainly responsible for the revision in the House, Bob
Kastenmeyer--he has an office in this building now--knew and has
said so recently that it was an outdated law when Congress passed
it but it was all we could get, and it got us over a tremendous
hump. We no longer have to deal with the 1909 law and its
antiquated provisions.
Now, twenty years later, you need a new statute. You
need a new statute desperately, one that can accomplish both
purposes of preservation and access. But you cannot do it by
bad-mouthing people. I have been through this sort of thing too
many times not to feel fairly strongly on this point.
Do not talk about wolves and rapacious this and that.
Do not do it, because it just gets the copyright owners upset and
you have conflict rather than discussion. It is very easy to
defeat legislation: very, very easy.
The proprietary groups, you must understand, have lived
through this. They lived through the photocopying problem and
did not do anything about it and lost. Once the technological
wave had crested, there was nothing they could do.
Then again they waited too late on the issue of home-
taping. They are determined not to let that happen again. I
have heard this time and time again. That is what you are
running into.
It is ridiculous for them to spend hundreds of dollars
to collect a dime or two. The transactional costs and the
bureaucratic staffing they need are staggering, but they have
instructions. Their lawyers tell them what to do and they have
to abide by it.
What you need is legislation, but you are not going to
get it by talking to yourselves. You really ought to stop that.
Instead, you ought to undertake a new legislative
program. The Library of Congress can spearhead it if it is
willing. It is not easy. Somebody from the Copyright Office
ought to be involved, and there are other forces at play.
The Patent Office, believe it or not, is very
interested in all this, too. They are very much on the
proprietor's side. The Library of Congress is a library and the
Copyright Office has traditionally played a neutral role in all
of this. I think they would provide a good focal point for the
kind of activities that I can envision here.
I am not going to be personally involved. I have had
it with all of this. But I can see what needs to be done, and
you need Congressmen that will support you. You need to go out
there and get some Congressmen interested in the problem.
Wait until after the election and see what happens.
But you need support from people who believe in what you want to
do--who are willing to listen to both sides and to sponsor
programs and eventually legislation. You need to sit down in
rooms like this and talk about actual statutory provisions.
As David knows, we recently had a bill cooking that
would have been devastating to the Library of Congress. It would
have done away with mandatory registration of copyright material.
We tried to work out some kind of compromise, which I don't think
was a bad one.
As part of that compromise, we considered amending the
law in a way that would have allowed the Library to do massive
off-air taping. I do think that is one rather modest way to
start.
I think that money could be found if there were clear-
cut statutory provisions governing what the Library would do and
the constraints that would have to put on their activities.
One reason that we were able to get some of the
provisions we got in 1976 was that the proprietary interests
trusted the Library. I think that kind of trust is very
important to preserve.
In this room two or three years ago, they had a big
conference about the Internet and its impact on copyright
proprietors and what the Library and the library communities
might do.
I made some suggestions along the way concerning
collective administration of rights and permissions. It does
seem to me that technology has broken the nexus between copyright
owner and the user. Instead, you need a system involving some
kind of pool out of which the copyright owner is compensated, but
where the owner cannot say no and cannot impose impossible
conditions.
On that occasion I got scorched by the proprietors, but
I do think that is the only way to go. There are already
organizations like ASCAP that provide private payment mechanisms
and keep the government's clammy hands off of the system.
It does seem to me that, at least in certain areas, the
future of copyright lies in collective administration of rights.
Maybe not with respect to belles lettres and that sort of thing,
but in music you already have ample precedents. Compulsory
licensing started with copyright, partly because of the greedy
actions of the monopoly holders back in the early parts of this
century. We have a lot of very rich history here that we can
draw on and I do not think we should try to reinvent the wheel.
There is something else I will mention in passing and
that is something you may not have heard of. CORDS. It is
written up in the current issue of the Library bulletin. What do
they call it now? It is the thing that the Library sends out
every two weeks, or whatever it is now. I see somebody grinning
back there.
MR. TABB: The editor of it.
MS. RINGER: The editor. Sorry about that, Jill.
CORDS is a product of a lot of planning, but the basic
planning was done by the guy that invented the Internet and
E-mail, Bob Kahn. I really have not followed too clearly what
has happened recently, but I think CORDS offers an awful lot of
promise.
It involves electronic registration of copyright
claims. As part of the registration system, the owner gives all
the terms and information a user would need, so that anybody
plugging into the Internet and pushing some buttons would be able
to find out what they have to pay, what they need to do, and so
forth.
This is in the very, very nascent stages, and yet I
think that this is what is going to happen sooner or later. No
paper changes hands at all. You register the copyright
completely electronically and the information goes online and you
can find out what you need to do in order to use the material.
It does seem to me that this ought to be brought into
these discussions and made very much a part of what ultimately
comes out of this. I think this has a lot more to offer than
just talking to yourselves. That does not really do any good.
Seriously, if you can, you should bring yourselves to
recognize that the proprietary interests are terrified over what
is happening. The Internet potentially allows anybody to do
anything with their property.
I think that they are probably sufficiently tractable
now--maybe you have already observed this--that they could be
brought into discussions that would produce good results that
would be in the public interest and in their interest.
They will not give up their rights, which they are
clinging to with every tendon in their bodies. The ATRA
legislation was part of a deal that was based on preserving their
rights.
In the legislative process, you give and you take. But
do not bad mouth your opponents, please. It is not productive.
It makes people mad and they will not listen to you. If you can
get into a room and talk about concrete proposals you are much
better off.
I have said all I am going to say.
MR. TABB: We have to call time now and we will adjourn
for a break. We will take only ten minutes. So be back at
11:20.
[Whereupon, a short recess was taken.]
MR. MURPHY: Let me convey apologies for Winston Tabb,
who has to leave us at this time. I am Bill Murphy and I will be
taking over the duty of moderator and I indeed will wield a heavy
gavel to try to get us back on time. We are running considerably
over schedule.
Let us begin now with the next panel of archives and
museums and we are starting with Maxine Fleckner Ducey, the
current president of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Maxine.
STATEMENT OF MAXINE FLECKNER DUCEY,
ASSOCIATION OF MOVING IMAGE ARCHIVISTS (AMIA), PRESIDENT
MS. DUCEY: In 1993 with the work underway on a
national plan for film preservation, AMIA, the Association of
Moving Image Archivists, joined many others in the moving image
archive community, including the Library of Congress in calling
for a parallel plan for television and video.
Now the Library has stepped forward to answer that
call. Messrs. Billington, Tabb, Francis and Murphy and all the
others at the Library of Congress deserve our thanks and our full
cooperation as they take on this daunting but much needed
project.
AMIA has prepared a written statement from which my
remarks today are excerpted because there is no way that they
would fit into the ten-minute limit, to provide information about
the Association and its growing role within the moving image
archive community and to identify the key concerns which we
believe a national plan for television and video preservation
must address.
The Association of Moving Image Archivists is a
professional association established in order to advance the
field of moving image archiving by fostering cooperation among
individuals concerned with the collection, preservation,
exhibition and use of moving image materials.
Since the late 1960's, representatives of moving image
archives have met regularly to exchange information and share
experiences.
Over the years these meetings grew from a handful of
participants to several hundred archivists representing over 100
national, regional and local institutions.
Currently AMIA consists of nearly 300 moving image
archivists. Our members collect, preserve and provide access to
a broad cross section of film, television and video media.
Classical and contemporary Hollywood productions, news
reels and documentaries, national, regional and local television
productions, including news, public affairs and entertainment
programming, film and video art, amateur footage and film and
video reflecting ethnic and minority experiences.
AMIA's three standing committees, preservation,
cataloguing and documentation and access all deal actively with
film, television and video issues.
In addition to special AMIA interest groups focus on
television news and documentary collections and on film and video
amateur footage.
AMIA is eager to work closely with the Library to
develop and implement an effective national plan which looks to
the interests of all concerned, archives and archivists,
educators and scholars, producers and rights holders and the
public.
Drawing from the experience and expertise of our
members, AMIA has identified several points crucial to
formulating a plan which will significantly improve the state of
television and video preservation.
The field of television and video preservation is less
clearly defined than that of film preservation. The players are
more numerous and varied. The scope of the preservation problem
is greater and less amenable to clear cut solutions.
Standards, principles and accepted procedures in
television preservation are not as fully developed, while the
technological base is more fluid and complex than that of film.
The national plan therefore must begin by addressing
some very fundamental issues. It should, first of all, state a
clear and convincing case for the importance of preserving
television and video materials.
Regrettably the historical, cultural, social and
artistic value of television programs and video productions,
particularly on a local and regional level, is still widely
dismissed.
It should also take into account the diversity of the
television and video preservation field. AMIA members alone come
from international corporations, government agencies, private
businesses, non-profit organizations and various cultural and
educational institutions representing every budget and every
staffing situation.
It should also expand the definition of television and
video preservation to include archival storage, cataloguing and
access.
It should determine the scale of the television and
video preservation problem, which we all known is enormous and
identify problem solving strategies which will take that scale
into account.
It should evaluate current television and video
preservation efforts. How are materials being preserved? What
is being preserved and by whom?
It should also create degree programs for educating new
moving image, including television and video archivists and
provide continuing education opportunities for those already in
the field.
Due to the scope and the complexity of television and
video preservation, the concept of a shared national collection,
which is so fundamental to the field of film preservation,
assumes even greater significance when applied to television and
video.
Coordination and shared responsibilities between a wide
array of public and private institutions and a formula for
securing and allocating additional resources are instrumental to
an effective national plan.
Some specific applications of the national collection
concept might include coordinated selection guidelines, which can
ensure that the broadest representation of television and video
materials will be preserved, while minimizing a duplication of
effort.
Shared preservation responsibilities among public
archives, but also between the public archives and commercial
producers and broadcasters. Non-profit and for profit
partnerships.
National or regional storage facilities. National or
regional laboratory facilities, which will be available for
preservation copying and equipped to handle obsolete video
formats.
Model donation and deposit agreements, which could be
used to foster positive relationships between public archives and
owners of television and video materials.
Finally the designation of selected non-profit archives
as regional repositories for an expanded Library of Congress
copyright collection.
The plan should encourage a stronger sense of shared
responsibility, emphasizing cooperation and collaboration among
all constituents in the television and video preservation field.
AMIA is dedicated to this approach and currently serves as an
ideal forum for its practice.
In the area of physical preservation, particularly
laboratory transfer and archival storage, the national plan
should work to clearly define the principles and components of a
television and video preservation program.
Such a definition should establish basic parameters
regarding formats suitable for preservation, the similarities and
differences between television, video and film preservation.
Approaching television and video preservation as a
process rather than as a product and factoring in the diversity
of archives and the disparity of their resources.
That is to say, yes, we should work on identifying
cutting edge technology, but we should also look for acceptable
lower cost alternatives.
The definition of preservations should emphasize the
central role of climate controlled storage and the promise of
regional storage centers.
It should encourage the research and testing of video
and digital products including new tape and disc formats and
examine the impact of new digital technologies in preserving
television and video materials.
Currently, the AMIA preservation committee is working
on two television and video projects. A manual for the care and
handling of videotape and a director of archival film and video
laboratory services.
In the area of access, especially educational,
scholarly and public access, a national plan must emphasize
access as an integral component of preservation and must foster
communication and cooperation among rights holders, archives and
the research and educational community, which will expand public
access to archival materials, while at the same time ensuring the
legal and economic interests of the rights holders.
It should explore methods for bringing television and
video materials to researchers, rather than forcing researchers
to travel to the materials.
It should promote agreements among archives,
educational institutions and rights holders, which would permit
off air taping of a broader range of television programming for
teaching and research use. It should promote the simplification
of the process of rights clearances.
The existing process, complex at best and in many cases
indecipherable, serves neither the interests of educators nor
rights holders.
It should emphasize the value of professional
cataloguing and where feasible of shared cataloguing and it
should examine the impact of digital formats and computer
technology on access to television and video materials.
Increased and creative funding for television and video
preservation is of course the bottom line of any national plan.
A successful plan should include items such as a
campaign to increase public awareness of the need for television
and video preservation by sponsoring traveling exhibits and
programs, a documentary on television and video preservation,
which could be broadcast nationally, a festival of preservation
similar to AMC's annual preservation festival for motion
pictures.
A plan should propose a mechanism to provide archives
with information and support materials to assist with local fund
raising. It should encourage federal, state, local and private
funding agencies to establish grant programs for television and
video preservation.
Promote non-profit and for profit partnerships as a
means of sharing preservation related expenses and when
appropriate, expand the mandate of the proposed national film
preservation foundation to encompass all moving images, including
television and video materials.
Many of the issues and ideas that I have just relayed
echo those identified by the National Film Preservation Board's
plan for film preservation.
This is going to surprise no one since in many ways the
fields of motion pictures, television and video converge. At the
levels of production, distribution and transmission, teaching and
research, archiving and preservation, moving images increasingly
constitute one field.
For this reason, AMIA urges the Library of Congress to
avoid duplication of effort by combining any parallel and
compatible initiatives which may emerge from both national plans.
Finally, AMIA urges that the Library continue to be
guided by two essential principles in conducting this project.
First of all, a national perspective recognizing the significance
of the project for the archival television and video community as
a whole.
Secondly, a commitment to collaboration validating the
involvement of the archive community in both designing and
executing the plan.
To the credit of both the Film Board and the Library,
these were the hallmarks of the study and plan for film
preservation and AMIA applauds the Library for continuing this
approach.
For its part, AMIA promises to work diligently with the
Library and other interested parties to achieve the promise of
any and all national plans fashioned to ensure the preservation
of America's moving image heritage. Thank you.
MR. MURPHY: Thanks very much.
Let us now turn to our next speaker, Mr. Cary O'Dell,
who is the archives director at the Museum of Broadcast
Communications in Chicago. Good morning.
STATEMENT OF CARY O'DELL,
MUSEUM OF BROADCAST COMMUNICATIONS, ARCHIVES DIRECTOR
MR. O'DELL: Good morning. I am Cary O'Dell with the
Museum of Broadcast Communications. Our president and founder,
Bruce DuMont, originally scheduled to be here could not make it
due to a sudden change in his schedule.
As archives director, I oversee an archive of 10,000
television programs, 8,000 commercials and 50,000 hours of radio
commercials.
The Museum of Broadcast Communications is one of only
two broadcasting museums in the United States. The second, the
Museum of Television and Radio is in New York City, which
recently opened a wing of themselves in Los Angeles.
Now you may be asking yourself, as I am frequently
asked, what is the difference between that museum and our museum
and I would give you my standard answer.
I do not know. I have never been to the Museum of
Television and Radio. In fact, I have never been to New York
City and until last night, I had never been to Washington, D.C.
But frequently the crux of that question implies that
there should be some significant difference between our two
museums. That there needs to be competition between our two
institutions.
However, no one ever insists that there be only one art
museum in the country or one science museum or one history
museum. So surely broadcasting, television and radio has proved
itself an important and influential enough to justify many
museums, archives and symposiums such as this one.
After I tell people this, I often sense a bit of
disappointment. They want there to be some competition, some
jockeying for position between us and them, but I do not think |
