Television/Video Preservation Study:
New York Public Hearing, March 1996
TELEVISION AND VIDEO PRESERVATION 1997:
A Study of the Current State of
American Television and Video Preservation
Volume 3: Hearing Before the Panel of the
Library of Congress
Sheraton New York Hotel
New York, New York
March 19, 1996
Report of the Librarian of Congress
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Opening Remarks by William Murphy, Coordinator, Current
State of American Television and Video Preservation Report
Introductory Remarks by James Billington, Librarian of Congress
Statements by:
John Cannon, President, National Academy of Television
Arts and Sciences
William Boddy, Professor, Department of Speech CUNY,
Baruch College and Graduate Center
Deirdre Boyle, Associate Professor,
The New School for Social Research
Kitty Carlisle Hart, Chairman, New York State Council for
the Arts
Stan Singer, Manager, NBC News Archives
Michael Lang, Senior VP, Business Affairs, ABC Broadcast
Operations and Engineering
Joel Kanoff, Associate Director, Video Services, ABC News
Doug McKinney, Director of Archives, CBS News
Donald Decesare, Vice President, Operations, CBS News
Jac Venza, Director of Cultural and Arts Programs, WNET-TV
Judy Crichton, Executive Producer, The American Experience, WGBH-TV
Peter Adelstein (Image Permanence Institute), Chairman,
ANSI Technical Committee IT9
Peter Brothers, President, SPECS BROS, LLC
Robert Haller, Manager, Anthology Film Archives
Duane Watson, Aaron and Clara Greenhut Rabinowitz Chief
Librarian for Preservation, New York Public Library
Barbara London, Associate Curator, Video, Department of Film,
Museum of Modern Art
David Weiss, Executive Director, Northeast Historic Film
Graham Leggat, President, Board of Directors, Media Alliance
Gloria Walker, Community Organizer Television Coordinator,
Deep Dish TV Network/Educational Video Center
Stephen Vitiello, Director of Distribution, Electronic
Arts Intermix
Sara Meyerson
Sam Suratt
P R O C E E D I N G S
James Billington Librarian of Congress
Erik Barnouw Professor Emeritus, Columbia University
David Francis Chief, Motion Picture Broadcasting
and Recorded Sound Division, Library
of Congress
Mona Jimenez Executive Director, Media Alliance
James Lindner President, Vidipax, Inc.
Panel Moderator:
William Murphy, Coordinator, Current State of
American Television and Video Preservation Report
MR. MURPHY: Good morning, everyone. Please
take your seats, we're about to begin the day's
proceedings.
I want to first begin the day by turning the
microphone over to Dr. James Billington, the Librarian
of Congress.
DR. BILLINGTON: Thank you. We're pleased to
welcome everyone here to the Library of Congress
Hearing on the Current State of American Television and
Video Preservation.
Two weeks ago I presented the Library of
Congress to our Congressional Appropriations Hearing
and this morning I'm happy to be on the other side of
the room facing witnesses. Today's hearing doesn't
have the legal and physical implications of a
Congressional hearing, but it's a very important event
for the Library of Congress and for the archival
community generally, and indeed, for everyone who
shares concern about preservation of our television
legacy.
Our first public hearing on this subject was
held in Los Angeles on March 6th. The panel heard
statements from archives, major studios and educators
and others who share this concern over preservation.
We heard encouraging reports from the major products of
prime time programming because as commercial
enterprises they have sufficient economic incentives to
maintain their materials under reasonably good
conditions, and thus insure availability for future
use. On the other hand, we heard from smaller
organizations with little or almost no resources to
safeguard and preserve the valuable television video
materials in their care.
This is the second of three public hearings
that the Library of Congress is conducting this month
and they're intended to develop a report on the current
state of American television and video preservation and
a plan listing recommendations. Both the report and
the plan will be published later in the year as a
single document. This activity is authorized under the
American Television and Radio Act of 1976--20 years
later; it takes a little while to get around to these
things in Washington, as you may have heard. But it's
being pursued in response to a recommendation more
recently from the National Film Preservation Board,
which is another Congressionally created body for which
we have a responsibility at the Library of Congress,
and also from the many groups and individuals who
helped draft Redefining Film Preservation, A National
Plan, which the Library of Congress published in 1994.
Now the American Television and Radio Act of
1976 authorized the Library of Congress to establish
and maintain archives whose purpose is to preserve a
permanent record of the broadcast programs which are
the heritage of the people of the United States and to
provide access to such programs to historians and
scholars without encouraging or causing copyright
infringement. These hearings and the report to follow
will help the Library develop and refine ATRA'S
policies--that's the acronym for American Television
and Radio Archive--to insure that we carry out our work
in concert with the other archives and libraries, and
with production and broadcast organizations.
These hearings and the report then parallel
our earlier film preservation study in several
important ways. First, we seek the same goals; that
is, to preserve the American heritage. In this case,
television and video, and make it more accessible for
educational use. Second, 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, community video, just to
name some of the largest categories. Thirdly, we
wish to encourage other archives and libraries to work
with the Library of Congress to accomplish the very
difficult task of preserving television video and
making them available. Fourth, we wish to address the
problem of funding, television and video preservations
programs, both in public archives and industry, no easy
task at a time when resources are scarce, relative to
the preservation workload ahead. Public and private
partnerships are essential and during the course of
these hearings we hope to receive your recommendations
on how these kinds of partnerships can be established.
There are other parallels with the film
preservation report worth mentioning. Like American
film, much of the early history of television, as I am
sure most of you aware has already been lost,
broadcasts were live and kinescope or film recordings
were used selectively, Ampex introduced a videotape
recording technology in 1956, and since then the
industry has manufactured or adopted numerous
incompatible video formats making technological
obsolence 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've
entrusted our historical and cultural images to
videotape and yet it's vulnerable to degradation and
destruction. Like film, everything associated with
video preservation is expensive, including specialized
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've 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 and the future of
such debates will be fruitless if the historical
evidence to pursue them does not survive.
I might say as not just the Librarian of
Congress who is responsible to the Congress of the
United States but as somebody who has been a resident
of Washington for nearly a quarter of a century, it's
been amazing to watch how official Washington and all
its aspects increasingly feels that it's either
legitimize or de-legitimize as sustained, vindicated,
elected, dis-elected, whatever, through this media, and
therefore, it seems to me that the interest in it and
the concern for how it functions, what its legacy is,
is only going to increase. So this problem is one that
is very much a part of coming to grips with what we are
becoming as a nation in the second half of the 20th
Century.
So in conclusion, the Library of Congress
encourages all of you in the audience to write down
your opinions and recommendations an we will collect
them up to April 29th. We hope to hear from people in
writing who don't have a chance to speak today, and
today we will hear from a number of distinguished
individuals, some professionals in the field, others
representing important organizations, that share the
goal of preserving American television and video and to
which, as I say, we have a special responsibility under
the Congressional mandate that we're pursuing here
today.
Before we begin, I'd like to thank David
Francis to my left, our admirable head of the Library's
Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division, and a long-time pioneer in the preservation
business on two continents--we're happy that he's on
ours right now; and Steve Leggett, extraordinarily
industrious, always self-effacing, in the back of the
room back there, just does simply wonderful work for
the Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound
Division. I can't say too much for all they're doing.
They're real saints in this pursuit of preserving this
important part of our cultural heritage, and
particularly for their work on this project.
And most especially the man to whom I'm going
to turn over the microphone, Bill Murphy, on loan from
our sister institution, the Washington National
Archives and Record of Administration, who is doing an
admirable job serving as the project's coordinator, who
will moderate today's hearing and to whom I'm pleased
to turn over the microphone.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you, Dr. Billington. At
this time I would like to introduce the members of the
panel. You've already met David Francis. To my right
is Dr. Erik Barnouw; and next Mona Jimenez, the
executive director of the Media Alliance; and last but
not least, Jim Lindner, president of Vidipax, Inc.
And so let us begin, but before we go into
the proceedings, let me state some of the ground rules
for the discussion and testimony in the interest of
moving the proceeding along expeditiously during the
rest of the day.
First, we will ask each panel to sit together
at the witness table when it is their turn to speak.
Second, the speakers will make their presentations in
the order listed; and third, each speaker should take
approximately ten minutes to give a statement. If you
have a longer written statement, that too will be
published in the record. If you exceed your time
limit, I will try to let you know politely so that you
can bring your statement to a conclusion. Fourth,
please speak into the microphone so that you can be
heard in the back of the room. Your statement and the
discussion are being recorded and transcribed and you
will receive a copy of the transcript for your review.
Fifth, the Library of Congress panel will ask questions
and make comments when each group of witnesses has
completed their statements.
I'm sorry we don't have enough time to accept
questions or comments from the floor, from the
audience; but I encourage all of you to send us written
statements which will be considered in the report.
This is all I'm going to say, and so with
that let us begin with our first witness, Mr. John
Cannon of the National Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences. Good morning, Mr. Cannon.
MR. CANNON: Good morning. I am the
president of the National Academy of Television Arts
and Sciences, and first of all let me tell you about
who we are. We do represent I think goodness, kindness
and we are the embodiment of not-for-profit activity,
we are statesmen of the industry; but putting all that
aside, we have a remarkable structure. We represent
virtually the entire United States. We represent about
95 per cent of television in the United States and the
concrete evidence of that is that we make available
local awards, local Emmy awards throughout the country.
And it is our belief that television is not in New York
and Los Angeles exclusively, that television really is
people in many, many cities and many, many places, and
we, because of our structure, can reach out.
I want to talk to you this morning about
thinking of preservation of television material,
documentaries and recorded history throughout the
United States rather than solely thinking about great
shows that we all saw on network television. But of
course, again by our structure, because we represent
the Emmy, the Emmy is the terribly, terribly
distinguished award. In the world, anywhere you go,
everybody knows the Oscar, everybody knows the Emmy.
Now there are very few awards like that. I can give
you two or three, four more, but by and large other
awards are--they're nice, they're somewhat conveniences
for having dinners, and kind of warming up for the main
event; but the only people unhappy about Emmys are
those who don't win them. Everybody wants an Emmy.
And you would have to sit in the office or run from the
office, which I frequently like to do, about people
calling and saying they should have won and Emmy and
how unjust the world is. But putting that aside, we
find that--maybe I shouldn't put it aside, but really I
find it very flattering and it only emphasizes how
truly great this Emmy is.
So when we talk about having archives, and
this is something very, very good, this is the kind of
thing we have a total commitment to at least
philosophically, if we can't do it physically which I
don't think we can do, but from the very creation of
this Academy we have always been proponents of it and
we have found that the educational world has been quite
marvelous at this and the Academy, which began in Los
Angeles and New York, began this kind of activity. I
know I was president at one time of the New York
Chapter and we had a very active relationship with NYU
in preserving materials. But we found that from a
national viewpoint that we couldn't possibly do
anything meaningful.
So we support all kinds of organizations that
want to do this and I'm sure you're all aware of the
very, very major commitment that the Museum of Radio
and Television has, and they have a great deal of money
and they just opened, if you saw in The New York Times
yesterday, they opened a branch, $16 million in Beverly
Hills. And I do know that Mr. Paley, who started this,
I don't think he ever made the short walk which is only
one block from what is called Black Rock, CBS, over to
ABC, it's from 53rd Street to 54th Street, and he never
made that walk, but he did one day decide he would go
over and see Leonard Goldenson. So he made the walk,
went up to see Leonard Goldenson, he said, "Leonard, I
want you to support something," and it was his museum.
And it never stopped from that point on. I've never
seen anything in our industry supported so widely and
with such deep pockets as that museum. So what your
relationship is with that, I don't know. I will ask
you later on what it is.
But I would like to focus a bit on some of
the things that we have done in our Academy and maybe
that we can open up some windows here for your
thinking. We had, oh, ten years ago, suggested that
each of our chapters encourage their community--let's
say Phoenix, Arizona--to establish an archival reposit
of what had been the best of television in Phoenix.
Now this concept I think has a lot of merit. We can
now envision--we have 17 cities and regions which as I
tell you covers most of the United States; but I think
it's very interesting if you're in Miami to have a
place you can go and see what has been the best of
Miami television. And I can further see occasions
where people would gather in the industry to review
their industry and all that's been accomplished there.
Cities do this, local television is very, very strong,
and people who have made great contributions to
television in all the local markets are honored.
They're honored by our organization and other
organizations. But this is a step further. It's not
easy to do. I would also encourage them to send
material to the museum; but I think maybe if the
Congress, if the Library of Congress would do this, it
would have more impetus, it would have more motivation.
But I try to open, as I say, open new vistas for you
here and I think this is something that I don't think
you'll hear from anybody else, of the concept of how
much material there is that only those people,
generally speaking only those people in their own
communities saw and were a part of. But that to me is
very, very valid and it fulfills what television should
be.
We feel that television is--the viewer should
be the boss of television. The view is the one who
makes all the decisions. And nobody forces anybody to
watch anything. Television will never be, or when we
say television today we mean all of broadcasting, the
telecommunications, whether it be satellite cable--this
is all one family, one experience really. But it is
the viewer that sets the standard an all the viewer has
to do is turn it off. And so television will never be
better than the viewer demands it to be and the more we
as an Academy, our dedication is to excellence, and we
are constantly talking to the people in the community
if we can and tell them to be as demanding as they can.
We have a project in the Academy called
Creating Critical Viewers. This is to educate young
people, the high school age, how to watch television.
We don't want them to grow up and be couch potatos. So
we have made a very major effort and invested very
major money in this so that we now have in 17 chapters
around the country, we have a paid administrator who
does this, and we engage--each chapter engages somebody
from the educational world who can communicate with the
schools. Television people are good at communicating
with the public in general, but they are not educators
and they don't quite know how to get into that world.
But this is evidence of what can be done, what can be
done for the public, and I think that's what we should
all think about and that's why we should preserve the
best of telecommunications, the best of these efforts
for the public, not for private collectors, but for
those who can benefit for the most, so we have a true
heritage to pass on. And we in the Academy can educate
young people so that they come out with a critical eye.
We think that's very good.
And also it's very encouraging that the
management, the station managers around the country
encourage this. They do not find it a threat to their
commercial profits. They agree that the better view
they have, the better television they'll all do. There
is no downside to doing good television and there's no
downside to having a program that doesn't have a big
audience either. In News and Documentary, Dr.
Billington was a presenter at our News and Documentary
Awards. PBS has always done very, very well in those
awards because they dedicate the time to it. And on
the commercial networks, sometimes we don't get as high
quality, although that varies, there's some very high
quality actually in the networks; but if you put aside
every so often the profit motive and say what can we do
that is the best for the public, it will happen.
So what we can do here by talking to you is
see if we can give you some ideas and give you a
feeling for the whole broad spectrum of television in
the 50 States of the United States, with which we have
a relationship.
I thank you all, and first of all being here
is annulus; but particularly to the Library and its
effort, I think this is very timely and it's a step
forward, and just couldn't be any more admirable. So I
thank you very much for listening to my few words and I
would be very pleased to talk to you and answer
questions. Maybe I'll ask you some questions.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you very much, Mr. Cannon.
Questions or comments? David?
MR. FRANCIS: I was very interested in what
you said about the idea, I think you used Phoenix as
the example--
MR. CANNON: Yes.
MR. FRANCIS: --of selecting in the different
chapters the programs which are important as far as
that part of the country is concerned, because one of
the big problems with television is there is so much of
it and it's not all national.
Now it seems that this idea could be
developed by the Academy so that each area was deciding
what they considered were the most important programs.
I think that would be a very valuable service, and it
could lead to those programs being preserved in that
area. What do you think about this? How successful
have you been so far?
MR. CANNON: Well, it didn't quite work.
These things take a great deal of incentive and effort.
The fire has to build up, you know. I think though I'm
very glad to hear what you say. I think that it's
worth another try. Ten years ago when we advocated
this, I don't think the Academy was doing all the good
things it's doing now. We have a very major
scholarship program now, we're giving two $20,000
scholarships and that's pretty good, because I look
around and there aren't that many $20,000 scholarships
being given out. Most scholarships are for $2,000 and
that will buy you books maybe, or $5,000; but we
decided to go into this in a very major way.
The reason I cite this is that atmospheres
change and when people realize what can be done and
we're doing these things, maybe this is another step we
could take. I really think it's worthwhile. And if we
could get a letter particularly from Dr. Billington, if
I could get a letter saying we encourage this, this
kind of encouragement would be a very good thing for us
and might bring this to a meeting and that's the way
these things start. We'd have to think out how this
can trickle some place, as I wanted to do it with the
museum, but I think they've got a pretty full plate
over there. Maybe we can do this through you. But we
need to have it go somewhere too, as well as--do you
agree with that?
MR. FRANCIS: Yes, certainly.
MR. MURPHY: Jim?
MR. LINDNER: You were mentioning the role of
education in regard to your membership and there's no
question that your membership is certainly the movers
and shakers of the television industry in many regards,
and I was wondering since the membership is so large
whether the Academy has published any brochures or
other information to help educate your members on
how to take care of their materials?
MR. CANNON: No. We never have. No, no.
That has never been done and that would never be done
because there is no program that would call for it.
But again, that's a good idea.
What we offer here is an availability if
somebody wanted to do that, the Academy has the
structure that allows for a lot of communication, if
somebody wants to come along and do that. What better
way for distribution than to use us. That might be a
good joint effort with somebody.
MR. MURPHY: Okay. Thanks again, Mr.--
MR. CANNON: Dr. Barnouw, I wanted to--
MR. MURPHY: Go ahead.
MR. CANNON: As I was joking with Dr.
Barnouw, I said that I read his book since I was three
years old, he said I was very precocious when I did
that, and I said but he wrote with such clarity, how
does he know that I didn't? But I want to take a
personal moment here to ask you, Professor Barnouw, of
what you do now. Do you lecture still at Columbia?
Are you still writing book? I'd like to know that.
DR. BARNOUW: I'm not lecturing at Columbia.
I've retired some 20 years ago.
MR. CANNON: I know that, but I thought--
DR. BARNOUW: I am still writing books, yes.
MR. CANNON: All right.
DR. BARNOUW: I don't want to make this a
personal advertising program.
MR. CANNON: Okay.
DR. BARNOUW: Yes, I just published a book
called "The Media Marathon," essentially a memoir which
goes to my life in all the media.
MR. CANNON: I'll certainly be looking for
that. It's a privilege to be here with you. Yes, Dr.
Billington?
DR. BILLINGTON: I was wondering if either
the Academy or the museum, which you mentioned, you
mentioned in connection with the museum deep pockets.
One of the fundamental problems with preservation is
that there are virtually no pockets at all.
MR. CANNON: That's right.
DR. BILLINGTON: And I wondered if you had
any thoughts as to how first of all you organization,
which does have all the prestigious and important
people in it, do either they or the museum have any
systematic institutional stated commitment to the
preservation of the television heritage or have there
been any major meetings or pronouncements devoted to
it? I just wondered as a matter of history.
MR. CANNON: I would highly recommend and I
think I mentioned to Mr. Murphy when he came to see me,
I highly recommend that you meet with first of all
Frank Bennick, who is the chairman of it, and he is the
president and CEO of The Hearst Corporation, all of
television and all of the newspapers too. I think that
would be a very worthwhile visit for you to have. They
are the ones who would have that kind of resource and,
of course, that's what they are doing. They are
preserving television. The Academy no, the Academy
does not and I don't think it's likely that the Academy
would get resources exclusively for that. Anything
could happen, but for when we talk about financial
wherewithal and also the structure and actually doing
it, I'd say the museum would be my prime target if I
were you.
DR. BILLINGTON: I see.
MR. FRANCIS: Bill, can I ask something?
Could I ask one small follow-up? Do you actually
manage to preserve the Emmy award programs, the
programs to which you give the awards?
MR. CANNON: Yes, we do. We keep, one way or
another, when we do a--when we do a telecast, by our
contract one copy of it comes to us. Generally the
networks keeps a copy too, the networks keep copies of
things like that.
MR. FRANCIS: But the individual programs?
MR. CANNON: No, not in--only winning
programs or--well, for instance, News and Documentary,
we get some marvelous material and it's so much of it
that we call up schools and see if they can pick it up
or we just have to throw it out. There's just not--
there aren't enough buildings to put all of this in.
They are going to take all our news and documentary
winning programs and preserve them. So we'd like to
find more opportunities like that and we'll find
another college, I think we can do it for sports, and
this concept of having someone's resource for it--we
like the schools, we think the schools are great at
this and they give a lot of attention to it and it's
very beneficial to them because students of the
communications departments can refer to this material
and it's quite wonderful.
But for an organization such as ours that has
no many award structures and so many awards programs to
do, our biggest problem is to clean out the shelves and
keep it moving out of our premises. We can't find a
building big enough to hold all that.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you very much indeed, Mr.
Cannon.
MR. CANNON: Thank you.
MR. MURPHY: I think in the interest of time
we have to move on and thanks again.
MR. CANNON: Thank you. I hope you have a
very successful day and a very rewarding experience.
It's quite admirable.
MR. MURPHY: We've been informed that Kitty
Carlisle Hart will be delayed, so we will move on to
the next panel of educators and we'll ask those people
to come and take a seat.
Well, good morning to you, and let us begin
with William Boddy.
MR. BODDY: Thank you. I'm going to read a
five-page statement, so I should be ten minutes.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you
this morning about a subject, television preservation,
which is crucial to the work of scholars and educators
across many fields and many academic institutions. My
words today will, I hope, build--
MR. MURPHY: Excuse me, could you pull the
microphone closer?
MR. BODDY: Sure. My words today will, I
hope, build upon previous testimony in Los Angeles from
educators, including Janet Bergstrom who spoke as a
representative from the Society for Cinema Studies, an
organization I have been actively involved with for
over a decade. I would first like to acknowledge the
work of the Library of Congress in film preservation,
including the hearings which produced a 1994 report,
"Redefining Film Preservation, A National Plan." I
will defer to the expertise of others here and
elsewhere who will speak to you on technical matters of
physical preservation and legal practice; what I wish
to add is simply the voice from a community of scholars
and educators whose work would be immeasurably
impoverished without access to the national heritage of
television and video material.
While occasionally arcane and technical
sounding, the work of television and video
preservation, I believe, serves to support nothing less
than the fundamental need of citizens in a democracy to
understand their collective past and to actively shape
their own cultural and political futures. I'd like to
address the four central issues of storage, access,
public/private partnerships, and funding, from the
point of view of someone who earns a living teaching
and writing about the history of American television.
To briefly introduce myself, my work in television
history began with a doctoral dissertation at New York
University, a dissertation which ended up as a book at
the University of Illinois entitled Fifties Television.
Since then I have contributed two dozen articles on
U.S. broadcast history to scholarly journals and
monographs in this country and abroad. The subjects of
these have ranged from television broadcasting efforts
by CBS and others in the early 1930s to the post-war
programming strategies of NBC and CBS, the quiz show
scandals of the late fifties, the TV violence campaigns
of the early 1960s, the rise and fall of the classic
television Western, the contested role of American
television programming in the U.S. image abroad, and
the history of independent video in the United States.
I'm currently writing a book on the social history of
electronic technology for Oxford University Press, as
well as a book on The Twilight Zone for the British
Film Institute's TV Classics Series.
Before turning to these larger questions of
what we ought to be preserving, allow me first to
direct some specific remarks to the four issues of
storage, access, public/private partnership, and
funding, which were raised in the Library of Congress's
report on film preservation. While, it seems to me
that these can, in large measure, be addressed in
similar terms to those involved in film preservation,
there are a number of novel aspects to the world of
television preservation. Concerning storage, for
example, I believe the Library can make an important
contribution by supporting the research and
dissemination of optimal methods for the preservation
of original materials and the conversion of original
materials to new storage media.
It might be noted that the term "television
preservation" involves original materials ranging from
35mm and 16mm film stocks as well as a plethora of
technologically obsolete or endangered electronic
recording systems. Unlike theatrical filmmaking, where
film formats and viewing technologies have remained
remarkably stable historically, television demands the
preservation of rapidly changing hardware systems as
well as program material. It seems to me that the
Library of Congress can lead in the sharing of
expertise concerning these historically fragile
technological platforms, in order to insure continued
access to the programming they support. Likewise, the
Library can pool technical expertise in the conversion
of these technologically endangered television
materials to more permanent and accessible electronic
formats, with the recognition that any new formats are
themselves likely to prove historically transient.
Finally, as in film preservation, it seems to be
prudent to pursue both the conservation of original
materials and the conversion to new electronic storage
systems.
The problem of access to television and video
materials presents similar continuities and exceptions
to the model of film preservation. There are common
goals in insuring the widest possible access for
scholars and educators to television collections, in
simplifying procedures for copyright clearances and
fair use, in enabling remote access to information
about the holdings of private and public archives, and
finally in moving to direct electronic access to non-
copyrighted television and video materials. These
issues of access are likely to be more complex and
vexing than the challenges of physical preservation and
storage, and copyright holders need to be protected
from unauthorized commercial exploitation of their
work, a concern more urgent with the prospect of a
commercial Internet trafficking in full motion video
and sound.
However, and this is the most deeply felt
point I would like to make this morning, there is an
urgent need to preserve the distinction between
educational and commercial uses of television and video
archive material, and with that distinction, the
practice of fair use of copyrighted material by
scholars and educators, whether for research, classroom
instruction, presentations at professional conferences
or scholarly publication. The Library of Congress
could encourage archives to devise donor agreements to
maintain this fundamental distinction in order to
insure access by scholars to copyrighted deposit
material. Issues of copyright may be more complex in
television than in film; unlike the model of the
studio feature film, networks and station operators
rarely own copyrights for the works they broadcast,
outside of news and sports. Copyright is more often
held by individual production companies operating in an
unstable business marked by a rapid turnover of firms.
Regarding issues of private/ public
partnerships and the funding of television
preservation, copyright owners must, I think, assume
the major responsibility for insuring the physical
preservation of, and scholarly access to, their
television and video material. However, the Library of
Congress can support these efforts by sharing
information about the storage and transfer of primary
materials and by encouraging and coordinating remotely
accessible databases of archive holdings. Public
efforts should also be extended to support the
preservation of vulnerable television and video
material which is either outside of copyright or which
lacks immediate commercial prospects for its copyright
holder. A public/private partnership in the form of a
federally chartered foundation could also support
efforts to preserve the diverse voices of artists and
independent video makers whose television work may
exist in endangered video formats and equally
endangered non-profit institutions.
I would like to conclude by speaking not of a
ten most-wanted list of disappeared programs, but more
generally about the special challenges of television
and video preservation in deciding upon what is worthy
of preservation. It is clear that television archives
confront a fundamental challenge in their collective
task; unlike the preservation of the collection of
unique one-run theatrical films, the basic definition
of a television artifact can be confounding. In the
commercial television medium, which thrives on various
forms of seriality, ought one to collect series pilots,
or some sense of representative episodes, or entire
seasons, or multi-year runs of a particular series?
Even compared to the thousands of American feature film
of the Hollywood era, the universe of television
material potentially available for archiving is
staggering, even more so in view of the on-going
proliferation of program outlets via direct broadcast,
satellite, cable, and broadcasting. Despite this
multiplication of program sources, many of them
recycling material from previous seasons, meaningful
scholarly access to television's past cannot be insured
to commercial syndication and to advertising supported
cable, no matter how single-mindedly devoted to various
forms of nostalgia they may be.
There is a host of contingencies which
determines the entrance and survival of any particular
network program in the syndication market, ranging from
the original program genre and number of episodes, to
the commercial and ideological needs of the current
commercial programmer and broadcast advertiser.
Television lacks film's cultural memory bank of the
repertory cinema or the video shop, and In an
understanding of television's role in our nation is
impossible without scholarly access to a much wider
universe of program materials than those of interest to
the demographically minded programmers at Nick at Nite
or The Family Channel.
Given this situation, let me offer an
historian's plea for the preservation of the widest
range of television material. Invaluable public
institutions like the Museum of Television and Radio
have taken on the dual task of both celebrating that
which it judges of highest quality in the medium and
also of assembling a collection which will illuminate
television's role as cultural and political agenda-
setter and battleground. However, historians need
access not only to the prestigious prime time network
hits, but also to less celebrated television material,
from low prestige genres, from affiliate fringe time,
from independent and community stations, and from the
chaotic world of small format video and public access
cable.
My own scholarly interests have been directed
at understanding the role of television programming in
wider cultural, intellectual and political contexts,
including the shifting definitions of citizenship and
the public sphere, the relation of American
intellectuals to mass culture, the policy debates
regarding broadcast regulation, the effects of
television violence, and the international role of
American commercial television. Addressing these sorts
of questions in an historical context in a meaningful
way is not likely to be accomplished by looking at a
few critically privileged programs. Instead,
understanding how commercial television became
entangled in such larger cultural and political issues
requires a broad consideration of as many relevant
programs as possible; a consideration only possible
with access to the resources of private and public
television archives.
Much of the most productive recent historical
work in film and television studies has indeed focused
on the culturally marginal and excluded, guided in part
by the proposition that what a society pushes to the
margins of cultural expression can say a great deal
about what is central to its beliefs and practices.
Television preservation, therefore, must make available
to future researchers and scholars the full range of
what is to be found on our nation's screens. Likewise,
future historians considering some of today's loudest
public and political controversies associated with
television, like the debates over the effects of
negative political advertising or the cultural
consequences of so-called trash TV, will depend on
their access to the often culturally denigrated
programs which provoked these controversies. My point
is simply that contemporary critical taste cannot offer
assurance about what future historians will find
revealing about our contemporary culture, and absence
such assurances, the prudent course seems to be to try
to preserve the diversity of our television
environment.
The challenges of preservation and access to
the uncountable hours of our television past and
present, a medium of both great cultural and political
power and of an almost willful ephemorality, are indeed
daunting. While my life in the classroom exposes me to
students who bring what seems to be increasingly short
cultural memories, there is also a genuine hunger among
students and among the public for non-nostalgic
confrontations with our cultural history. As
television increasingly becomes the medium for
historical representation and popular memory, it is
vital that its own place in history be available for
scrutiny and contestation. The often unglamorous work
of television preservation is the necessary ground for
such democratic interrogation and we neglect it at our
peril. Thank you.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you, Mr. Boddy. I think
we're going to skip Peter Herford for now and go on to
Deirdre Boyle. Good morning.
MS. BOYLE: Thank you very much. Thank you
for inviting me to speak here today at this hearing.
Others will make the case for why broadcast television
news and entertainment programming need to be
preserved. Rather than add to that resounding chorus,
I will simply say that growing up in the '50s, as a
member of the first television generation, I responded
actively to television. At 12 I appeared on a local
children's show to speak out about my gripe, that
children should be seen and not heard. Arguing
persuasively I believed at the time, that children
would never grow up to be effective citizens and
responsible adults if they were prevented from
expressing their thoughts and testing their ideas; I
exercised the power of television to shape public
opinion. I thought we all had that right, that that
was what television was there for.
Because television has not always served as
an arena for public discourse and creative expression,
members of my generation when presented with the first
consumer video technology in the late '60s responded by
setting out to re-invent television, to create a
parallel system to the then monolithic world of network
TV. They were inspired by the ideas of Marshall
McLuhan and other media gurus; by the social and
political movements sweeping the country at the time--
and the world I should add; and by a revolution in the
arts that celebrated process, not product.
Some of the most talented members of that
first TV generation joined video collectives, not
broadcast unions, producing lively video programs seen
in Soho lofts, public library basements, community
centers, on public access channels, in alternative art
spaces, off-off Broadway theaters, and later on, on
public television, network TV and eventually pay cable.
It was independent video pioneers like TVTV, working
outside the industry, who first brought the portapak to
a major media event, the 1972 Presidential Nominating
Conventions. TVTV demonstrated the versatility of
portable video to networks still hardwired to
cumbersome quad equipment, propelling the development
of the first ENG cameras and the quick transition from
vid-film to all-video news departments, and
aesthetically influencing the look of television news
and documentary programming. Without a consideration
of the contributions of video pioneers such as these,
any history of American television, not to mention
recent American social history, will be incomplete,
distorted.
The achievements of video artists and
documentarists, many of whom worked within the
experimental TV labs at public television stations
during the '70s and '80s, are co-extensive with
television but go far beyond it. Artists like Nam Jun
Paike, for instance, produced single and multiple
channel video works using video as a sculptural medium,
creating environments never designed with television in
mind. The task of preserving such art work is perhaps
more daunting than tackling single-channel videotapes,
but no less important if accurate records of the
cultural history of the last half of this century are
to be made.
My own area of research, the history of
documentary video makers in the '70s, led me in 1983 on
a cross-country journey in search of historic tapes and
their makers. This was my first brush with the already
alarming state of video preservation. In New Orleans,
I excitedly located a tape I had read about and heard
about, only to discover as I opened the black plastic
box, a sickeningly sweet smell emanating from the
encrusted white crud that covered the unplayable tape.
The New Orleans Video Access Center had been inundated
and their tape archive, housed in the basement, was
badly affected. It was only one of many such
disappointments encountered while researching: tapes
mislabeled, tapes missing, tapes that played for five
minutes then devolved into a series of morse code like
black-and-white glitches, tapes made on machines that
were unrepairable or nowhere to be found. Housed in
garages, basements, in closets and footlockers, the
precious record of an historic period lay vulnerable to
fire, flood, heat, humidity, carelessness and
indifference.
I was part of the first wave of video
historians, critics and curators who uncovered the
array of preservation problems confronting individual
artists, media art centers, video distributors, funders
and exhibitors. Since then I'm happy to report
progress has been made in launching this vast effort at
locating historic programs, cataloguing them, providing
archivally acceptable storage for these tapes and their
playback equipment, developing reliable, low-cost
methods for cleaning, restoring, and preserving tapes,
and sharing information with others similarly engaged.
All sorts of partnerships have been forged. Time
prevents me from enumerating them, but in a monograph
that I wrote a few years ago for the Media Alliance,
Video Preservation: Securing the Future of the Past, I
did outline some of this. The very fact that the
Library of Congress has agreed to this hearing and to a
serious inclusion of video and television programming
within its preservation purview, is perhaps the best
sign that the times are a-changing.
Clearly there are economic incentives that
motivate broadcasters' interests in the preservation of
classic entertainment programs and the archiving of
broadcast news and public affairs programming. But
economic reasons should be the least compelling ones
when deciding video preservation priorities. Consider,
for example, the tapes made by Broadside TV, a unique
experiment in local origination cable programming
produced by community video activists in Appalachia in
the mid-'70s. Although the characters who appear in
these tapes are not household names like Lucy or Uncle
Walter, they helped extend the concept of oral history
to video and gave isolated people living in the hills
and hollers of Appalachia a tool to confront strip
miners, state legislators, and future generations.
From the viewpoint of the social historian, the student
of American politics, communications and culture, the
value of such tapes is immeasurable, and I'm happy to
report that this collection is housed in the Archives
of Appalachia in Tennessee.
Here's one more scenario to consider. I
think few people here would argue that Ken Burns'
documentary series on the American Civil War was a
signal broadcasting event. By coupling early
photographic images--daguerro tintypes, carte-de-visite
photos--with readings from the letters and diaries of
both famous and ordinary ordinary individuals, Burns
evoked the agony of a nation divided. His success
depended upon the official documentary photos of battle
scenes or of commanders-in-chief shot by artists like
Matthew Brady, as well as anonymous portraits of raw
recruits produced two for 12-1/2 cents. Burns employed
the full range of photography, a visual medium barely
30 years old at the time.
Imagine if you will now a documentary
producer 100 years from now who is interested in making
a documentary about the recent Gulf War. She would
need to have access to videotapes; not just to those
broadcast as news by CNN or NBC, but those exchanged by
military personnel and their families during the war.
It was during this war that home video became a favored
medium for the intimate exchange of ideas, images and
memories, absorbing the functions of photography,
letters and diaries. These homemade tapes were just as
much a part of the war record as the orchestrated image
of high-tech electronic war seen on television.
Since videotapes have come to replace
snapshots, audio tapes, Super 8 films, letters, and
even written diaries for reporting the milestones of
our lives, video has become the fabric of our family
memories and by extension of our collective social
history. We in this room know that video has a limited
lifespan. The manufacturers of videotape and recording
technology know this, too; but the millions of people
who own handicams and record Billy's birthday party,
Jennifer's soccer game, and the children's wedding on
tape don't know that their precious memories will fade
in time to mere snow on a flickering screen.
What does this mean to a culture that has
become increasingly dependent on visual images for its
self-image, its view of the world, and its
understanding of what is and isn't true? What does
this mean if our databanks of images, those public and
collective as well as those private and personal, fade
into oblivion? I would argue that, without evidence of
the past to re-examine and reconsider, we become
increasingly vulnerable to the spin doctors of history
who reshaped the past to serve other agendas. The
entire spectrum of video recordings, from those
professionally recorded for cultural institutions like
network television, to those made by you and me to
memorialize the events of our lives, demands our
attention and concern. Were the public to realize just
what is at risk if video as a medium is dismissed as
ephemeral or someone else's concern, we would have a
considerable lobby behind us and this enterprise.
And my last comment is really made as an
educator. When I completed the book that I had been
working on for 13 years and heaved a sigh of relief, I
gave it to my graduate assistant to read to find out
how well I was communicating to someone who was born
the very year that video and man first went to the
moon. Needless to say, Alex was not very conscious of
video during the period of time that is the subject of
my book. I was gratified that he was very enthusiastic
about what I had written and surprised at his amazement
to discover that what I had to say about the '60s and
the '70s was so different from what he had learned
elsewhere in this culture. Bell-bottoms and peace
signs and rock music of the period, was pretty much the
lingering image of this time for him; and he is a very
intelligent and sensitive person. We had a very
interesting dialogue, and I shared a number of these
tapes with him, and it convinced me that there was
indeed a reason to make the images of this time period
available to younger people. But more importantly,
what really struck Alex was the sense of optimism that
pervaded this time period, an optimism that was so much
a part of my generation and that is not a part of his
generation, a sense that one can change the world, that
it is indeed the legacy of youth to feel empowered and
to believe that it is possible to make a difference.
And I think if for no other reason than this, making
these historic materials available is necessary and
perhaps increasingly a necessary counter-measure if we
are to have a really vital society. Thank you.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you very much. Is Peter
Herford in the room? Questions from the panel?
MS. JIMENEZ: I have one.
MR. MURPHY: Yes, Mona?
MS. JIMENEZ: Yes, I was wondering if you
could describe a little bit more about access to the
materials, in addition to the physical problems that
you were experiencing. Where do you actually find
particularly independently produced video materials?
Where do you find them--either one of you actually--
through what kinds of networks and what obstacles do
you face in finding the materials?
MR. BODDY: You're probably more expert on
this.
MS. BOYLE: Well, let's differentiate the act
of researching and searching for things in the highways
from the by-ways. As an educator I turn first to non-
profit video distributors like Electronic Arts Intermix
and Video Data Bank and a few sources like that,
because given the infrastructure within the independent
media community, distributors have taken on the role of
maintaining, keeping alive, cataloguing, and otherwise
making accessible the history of independent
production.
There has been something of a bias toward art
over documentary because art often seems to have a
longer life than documentary works. There are other
places to turn. I'm not sure if Media Network still
has their information service, but it has been a source
for locating more fugitive materials like documentaries
that haven't always been seen as financially lucrative
in terms of distribution. I think that people wind up
having to read a great deal in order to find other
sources.
MR. BODDY: I would add that Electronic Arts
Intermix, Video Data Bank, the Museum of Modern Art all
have very active circulating collections. In terms of
day-to-day teaching, those are the three sources I've
used. They also do a very good job in documenting
material, providing lots of information, bibliographies
on artists and tapes, and are very forthcoming about
allowing student access to material not for classroom
use.
In New York City, the Donnell Film Library,
and to a small extent the Museum of Television and
Radio, collects and holds this sort of independent
work. And I agree that there is a bias toward film or
video about artists rather than in community activism
and documentary.
MR. MURPHY: Dr. Billington?
DR. BILLINGTON: One of the things with film
we've done is that--well the Congress has done really--
is to create this National Film Registry whereby we
pick 25 sort of films for their historical, cultural,
aesthetic significance every year, and that's designed
to dramatize the need and also to pick out some
important illustrative examples for preservation. Do
you think something comparable would be possible and
useful in the world of television, and related to that
is the literature, the academic literature, does it
provide a sufficient base of sort of shared critical
standards that would enable one to pick such in this
much more, in a way miscellaneous and diverse world of
television, 25 such or some other number; we found that
to be particularly I think a useful way of dramatizing
the need for film preservation. Would it
be--we always say at the time, it's my responsibility
ultimately to pick these on the base of the board's
recommendations, of course, and a lot of public input.
We always say that it's not the Academy Awards, these
are not the Academy Awards, but these are historically,
culturally and aesthetic significance, that's the word
that the Congressional Act has produced.
Do you think it's possible to define such a
universe and is it desirable to dramatize the cost of
preservation?
MR. BODDY: I think that the National Film
Registry has had a good effect in the film studies
community, particularly because it's obvious that
you've looked beyond the Hollywood feature film with
the major grosses or the critical successes of a
particular year, and broadened the definitions and the
cultural memory of film. I think it also provides a
kind of window on the work of film preservation. I
think those two aspects are important for the task of
widening our definitions of television and television's
past, especially about recovering the stuff that isn't
an Emmy-award winning show, that wasn't aired on a
network, that nevertheless may have had an incredible
historical impact. So I think that designating a broad
range of television material, to have something that
was very mainstream and very prominent alongside
something like TVTV or something from that independent
community, would be very helpful.
The other part of the registry program, using
public screenings to reinvigorate the theatrical film
experience, I don't know if there is an analogy with
the work of television preservation. And certainly the
basic task of designating, of wading through and coming
up with 25 or 75 titles, in television is a bit more
daunting.
But I think the positive aspects of making
the work of preservation more visible and of broadening
the cannon, of redefining what it is to think about
television, I think that would help.
MS. BOYLE: To answer the second part of your
question about is there a body of literature extant, I
think there is more and more being written and our
efforts are somewhat symptomatic of that. But I think
that in order to make a selection of titles to
preserve, you would have to assemble a body of experts
from a fairly wide frame of reference because there are
overlapping areas of expertise, but then there are
other areas of expertise that don't overlap at all.
And there would be considerable contention I think
within, say, the wider community of independent video--
perhaps it's not all that different from looking at the
tribes within the film community. I think one would
have to throw a very wide net.
And it may be worth considering in this
larger debate criteria around endangered programs
rather than only significant programming, or at least
to give them some sort of equal status. With film, the
problems of nitrate preservation created priorities.
With video, I think urgency is less easily defined
technically, but there are certainly works that are
becoming unretrievable as time passes and there may be
some need to factor that into decisions. But like
Bill, I would agree to anything that gets public
attention: if it's a list, and lists do tend to get
people's attention, then by all means, use whatever
will work.
MR. FRANCIS: Really, this is a follow-up on
that question. Obviously the Library itself can only
do so much. One of the things we're hoping that will
come out of these hearings and out of the study is that
we can engage the whole community more in dealing with
these problems.
We've heard both here and in L.A. of the
importance of particularly non-broadcast television to
the academic community. Would it be possible for say
S.C.S. to come up with a listing of key items, even if
it only contains 200 or 500, not currently available
which the academic community would like to have, so
that the final plan could address some specific
programs. Obviously there's a rights issue here as
well, but if it was possible for say S.C.S. or any
other body to come up with this endangered television
list of material that would be widely used if it was
available, I think this would be a very valuable step
forward because it would give us something concrete
which we could concentrate on. Do you think that's a
feasible approach?
The second part of the question is do you
think if there was agreement over this list, that the
academic community itself in order to have these
materials available, would be prepared to assist in
some small way in preserving and making available the
programs, subject obviously to copyright owner's
agreement?
MS. BOYLE: Even though I'm wearing my
academic hat here, I wear several others, including
that of a curator and a writer and someone who's been
involved in other aspects of the independent media
community. I think that there are certainly good
reasons to go with an organization like S.C.S. in
making these choices. But I think it leaves out some
of the key players, for example, curators in museums,
and the people who have been directors and producers
within media arts organizations. While academics may
have interests in this area or even have close ties, I
think that there would be some problem in having the
full breadth of independent media necessarily
represented in their choices. Perhaps I'm being overly
cautious here, but I think I'm a little reluctant to
endorse the idea of turning it over to one academic
group.
MR. BODDY: Yes, I think that's appropriate.
I think it's a good idea and I think that S.C.S. could
collaborate with other people. I think those voices
are important to bring to that question. So I'll bring
it back to S.C.S. people.
MS. BOYLE: The other part of your question
about whether academic institutions would be willing to
lend an economic hand in this matter--I don't know
about other academic institutions, but my own doesn't
lend economic hands to its own faculty. So I think
that one has to then look to large institutions, and
perhaps there is an advantage in creating partnerships
with well-endowed institutions that permit public
access to their collections. But I don't know if it's
realistic to expect that this is going to be an
overwhelming response.
MR. MURPHY: Thanks very much. We're now
going to invite Miss Kitty Carlisle Hart to the witness
table. Good morning.
MS. CARLISLE HART: Good morning. Hello.
Any one of these microphones will do?
MR. MURPHY: Right in front of your name
plate.
MS. CARLISLE HART: I see. Now we all know
who I am.
This is indeed a welcome opportunity to speak
to this distinguished panel. The issue of television
and video preservation is dear to me personally, as
Chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts,
because as you probably know--
MR. MURPHY: Excuse me, could I ask you to
pull the microphone a little closer? Yes, that's good.
Thank you.
MS. CARLISLE HART: As you probably know, I
spent quite a long time in my life in television. I
was on a program called To Tell the Truth for about 17
years and I care a great deal about television. It's
turned every town into a small town for me, because
people come toward me smiling and they remember me from
To Tell the Truth and other shows long before that. So
I'm a veteran of Goodson/Todman and the early
television, so this is something that I care about.
Now speaking in my role as chairman of the
New York State Council--can you hear me now? Good.
Perhaps a bit of history will clarify why the Council
is concerned about television and video preservation.
The Council was an early and ardent supporter
of independent video. As early as 1966, the Arts
Council had already helped experimental artists present
video in a variety of performances and exhibitions. I
remember the early performances and exhibitions on
television, and let me tell you, they were pretty
experimental. It was almost incomprehensible, but it
was something, and it was the wave of the future, and
my people at the Council said we've got to go for it,
and I believed them, so we went for it.
In 1969, the New York State Council on the
Arts provided a grant to start a series of video
production networks for young people with the public
television stations around the state. When the Council
budget increased in 1970, sadly it's decreased
remarkably, video flourished, community video centers
were established across the state from Buffalo to Port
Washington. Other groups emerged to explore the
creative potential of the medium and put it in the
hands of performing and visual artists. A study was
commissioned to create the television lab at WNET,
which was really very important.
This was a time of tremendous possibility and
experimentation. Artists like Nam June Paik and
Shirley Clarke were creating a new artistic medium.
With small investment public funds, we created a weekly
rural cable series in the Catskills and in Jamestown.
Partnerships with public television brought the arts
home to homes throughout the state and around the
country. Innovative documentaries were being produced
in ways not possible for film.
In the early 1980s the Council was funding
over 80 organizations involved in video in New York
State. Hundreds of productions had already been
created and the Council was not alone in its investment
in independent video. Other public funding agencies,
the National Endowment for the Arts, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, public television, arts
councils in many other states, were deeply involved in
funding production and acquisition of this work.
In the next few years we would hear from
museums and from distributors that their collections
needed to be transferred to another video format. In a
very limited way, the Council began to assist in the
conservation of videotapes at the Museum of Modern Art
and in the collections of several distributors. The
Council felt that it was vital that the work continued
to be available to the public in the present and also,
obviously, for the future.
Where are all these tapes today? Very little
is in traditional archives. Work of the most
influential community workshops is stored in barns,
attics, public library stacks. A few organizations
have made heroic efforts in providing safe haven to
whole collections, like the Visual Studies Workshop in
Rochester. A variety of institutions, scholars and
curators are coming forward to assure that the very
different creative uses of video are catalogued,
conserved, and brought to the attention of the public.
Working with Media Alliance, the Council has helped
bring these organizations and individuals together to
share their knowledge and foster collaborative efforts.
Deborah Silverfine, the director of our electronic
media and film program, will be submitting a statement
of our activities, along with some recommendations for
future plans.
To touch on some of our efforts, the Council
has provided some support for cataloguing so that
regional and specialized collections are reflected in
the NAMID database being created. The Council has
funded both lab costs and storage space, but it can't
do it alone. It's not possible. The problem is far
too big. We hope that the study being undertaken by
the Library of Congress will point toward new
partnerships, new solutions, and increased awareness of
television and video preservation needs. And, so much
of our contemporary culture and our history is being
recorded on video by choice or by necessity, it is
critical that we find ways for those images and sounds
to endure.
Have you any questions? It's quite a large
subject. We all have a lot of questions.
MR. FRANCIS: Miss Hart, the achievements of
the Council are well-known and are incredible. It's
very sad to hear that funding is more difficult now
than it was in the past.
MS. CARLISLE HART: Oh, much.
MR. FRANCIS: We heard when we were in Los
Angeles from one of the people in Florida who said that
Florida is operating a state lottery which gives a
certain amount of money towards film and television
activities. I wondered whether New York State had
considered this; and whether you thought it was a
feasible approach? You're aware probably of what's
happening in the United Kingdom at the moment, that the
lottery there is providing a resurgence of funding for
all aspects of the arts. I wondered whether on a state
level here, and particularly in a state like New York,
this was a feasible approach to rebuilding funding?
MS. CARLISLE HART: The only time a lottery
was approached to me by the lottery director Mr. Quinn
was to do a lottery for the arts, and it died aborning,
it didn't last very long. It was not properly
publicized, it was not taken up properly, and it didn't
quite work out. That's the only time. I've always
opposed a lottery because I felt that the minute we had
a lottery in this state, then the state would stop
funding the arts, because they would say you're getting
it this way, so we're not going to do it, and I wasn't
sure that it would work.
MR. FRANCIS: Thank you.
MS. CARLISLE HART: I have someone here named
Debbie Silverfine, who is head of our electronic media
and film, and she's very good about answering
questions, if you want to ask any technical questions.
DR. BILLINGTON: Let me ask a non-technical
question. First of all, thank you very much for being
here.
MS. CARLISLE HART: Delighted to see you
again.
DR. BILLINGTON: For all the wonderful work
you've done over the years, which would be impossible
to fully document, but some day it's going to obviously
become part of our--not merely New York, but our
national history.
MS. CARLISLE HART: Thank you.
DR. BILLINGTON: So we're really honored and
pleased to have you. But as a public personality, how
do you feel--this is a very non-technical question, but
a rather essential one, perhaps second only to funding
and perhaps even more important--how does one, someone
who's been extraordinary successful in relating to the
broader public and yet at the same time maintaining
your own very high standards, how does an issue like
this get across to the public? I mean the public
watches television, but I've never seen an announcement
on television saying could you help; we have phone-a-
thons for everything else. Is there some way that
television itself could contribute to its own
preservation?
MS. CARLISLE HART: If you've been watching
television, you will realize that not only would they
not be interested, they're not interested in decent,
first-class programming. I hope the press is here. I
find the whole television spectrum a disgrace and I
find that my friends only watch news, one or two
programs, WNET, CNN, and some of the cable things like
history; but it has fallen into total disrepute and the
standard is so much lower than when I first came into
television, that it is a disgrace.
So to ask a television studio to even
understand what video, public or experimental
television is, I don't know how you would get it across
to them. I despair.
DR. BILLINGTON: But how then does one
communicate about this to the general public? Surely
it would be helpful in terms of the general, national
consciousness of television to have a little more full
knowledge of the richness and variety of what has
actually already been achieved, albeit small ways and
in various peripheral ways to the main enterprise
perhaps. But that would seem to be all the more
important for getting a broader range of the television
experience preserved and made public. How does one
dramatize the importance of that if television itself
can't help?
MS. CARLISLE HART: I agree. I think that's
absolutely true. The only thing I can think of is some
cable stations that might be more open to this kind of
suggestion. The networks certainly are not. But cable
is beginning to come into its own, as you know even CBS
and NBC are going into cable and there will be stations
that will be interested, I'm sure. And one has to find
them, you have to--we have to go after that. It's a
very good idea.
Debbie, where are you? Why don't you come up
here and tell us what you think?
MS. SILVERFINE: I think I'm not invited to
speak today, but I will write them a statement.
MS. CARLISLE HART: What do you think could
be done to broaden the spectrum?
MS. SILVERFINE: I'm Deborah Silverfine, I'm
the director of electronic media--
MS. CARLISLE HART: I've explained.
MS. SILVERFINE: --fine. We will be
submitting some recommendations. But if we do find any
partners who can make the plea, really do help us, and
I think the work that American Movie Classics has done
about raising the consciousness of the issues of film
preservation are very helpful for the American public.
And, they can be doing even more, talking about various
aspects like the role of sound in film, the
documentary, etc. And I think they might be one of our
partners actually in bringing this consciousness to the
fore about television history.
DR. BILLINGTON: Who is they in this case?
MS. SILVERFINE: They, meaning the cable
stations that repackage earlier programming. I agree
with Mrs. Hart that we need to look to our public
television stations and a number of the cable stations,
and I think the networks might be more helpful if
called on the right way. They will be important
partners in this effort, because that's where people
watch television.
MR. MURPHY: Speaking of the networks, we do
have to move on to the next panel.
MS. SILVERFINE: They're up next.
MS. CARLISLE HART: They're up next? Oh,
good, I'll stay and listen.
MR. MURPHY: I want to thank you very much
for your statement.
MS. CARLISLE HART: Thank you.
MR. MURPHY: And please do stay and listen.
MS. CARLISLE HART: I'm delighted to have had
the chance to meet you all, and my friends again.
Thank you.
MR. MURPHY: Can the Broadcasters Panel A
please take the witness table?
Good morning to everyone. We'll start with
Mr. Singer from NBC. Good morning, Stan.
MR. SINGER: Good morning. I have a brief
statement, just sort of a general overview. I'll be
happy to answer any questions on what we're doing
afterwards.
MR. MURPHY: Could you speak closer to the
microphone please?
MR. SINGER: Yes, I will move it closer.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you.
MR. SINGER: I'm Stan Singer, I'm the manager
of the NBC News Archives. The NBC News Archives is
responsible for preservation of news film and
videotape, archival databases, film and tape libraries
and warehouses worldwide for NBC News. NBC News has
relied on its archives as a support mechanism for over
50 years. What began as a way of keeping a collection
of major news events became a way to present broadcasts
in a cost-efficient manner. If one show shot an image,
a second show was not required to send a camera crew
out to record it again if the archives could turn a
clean, well-preserved copy quickly. Needless to say,
our images are used every day, in every news show that
airs on NBC. We also feel this great responsibility
towards keeping the recorded history of this country
during the second half of the 20th Century.
Additional attention has been focused on the
collection, heightened by the rise of the number of our
outlets, including the NBC Super Channel in Europe and
the Microsoft joint venture. Cable and the Internet
are just two growth areas that could produce an
unlimited number of access points for the consumer.
The problem is there is not an equal amount of
programming to go with it; thus, the archives provides
NBC with enormous flexibility to produce high-quality
programs at a reasonable cost. But this new world is
also fraught with perils for archives and I'll talk
about that in a second.
The NBC News Archives is currently involved
in a number of special projects to improve our
collection. We've spent two years designing a powerful
new database that will allow NBC personnel to perform
sophisticated searches on the editorial content of the
archives via visual write-ups, transcripts, and key
words. They will be able to view or hear digitized
portions of the collection and place electronic orders
for the original material to our libraries and
warehouses around the globe. We are designing a new
facility to allow better climate controlled storage for
our film and tape, as well as offering us the ability
to separate duplicate copies of our broadcasts to
prevent catastrophic loss.
For the past three years we've been
transferring our oldest tape formats. Our two-inch
tapes will be completely transferred to an analog and
digital copy by the end of the year. Shortly we will
begin the enormous task of transferring our 3/4-inch
cassettes. The reason why these are the first on our
list of preservation items are two-fold. The two-inch
tape, though generally of good quality, will no longer
have the hardware to play back in a very short amount
of time. While there is an abundance of 3/4-inch
hardware, these tapes have shown the most dramatic
decay of any portion of our collection. Jimmy Carter
and Ronald Reagan are rapidly fading. This does not
mean that other tape formats are much better; all
videotape will require transfer in the not-too-distance
future. This will present, as the previous speaker
mentioned, an enormous crisis for the country and the
world if we broaden the scope to include all consumer
videotape that's in everyone's possession.
The digital era may help all this and I
certainly will be the first to cheer when we leave the
videotape era. But there's also this peril. We are
feeling our way through the new mediums. In the
process, the focus has been on producing, not
preserving. What will happen to all those web sites?
What will be a cost-effective way of archiving cable
channels? What will be compatible to what? There are
many ideas as to what is digital and many hope that
computer and television meld together into one great
unified and standardized entity.
But there is also the chance that the climate
that produced the two-inch and the 3/4-inch videotape
will simply repeat itself. During that period, the old
medium film was being replaced by the first videotape,
but that two-inch tape was too expensive and most was
recorded over as a cost savings. This is similar to
what we hear about high quality digital disks. Then
other formats developed, some better than others, some
that failed rather quickly, just like what's happening
now. Libraries became splintered as different groups
controlled their own formats. Much was lost because
production groups did not focus on preservation. Much
was lost when experimental formats were abandoned.
Much was lost because hardware evolved. All the while,
new information came pouring in and new ways with ever
greater volume.
All these scenarios are occurring today and
it's important that the Library take a leadership role.
For you to set the standards of how best to preserve
all tape formats and to keep a storehouse of the
hardware, as well as the cassettes. Beyond this, the
Library must anticipate the results of this next
revolution and try to assist in setting guidelines for
retention of all that is being produced in non-
traditional ways, with multiple digital hardware and
software formats, and to work towards a unified digital
format, and to best determine how to save all the 24-
hour per day streams of information.
We will face this at NBC and then much more,
and we look forward to working with the Library and
others in the field in sharing our experience.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you. Mr. Lang?
MR. LANG: Thank you. In June of 1993, the
senior corporate management of ABC gave its
enthusiastic support to a project intended to ensure
that the network's vast archive of own video material
would be preserved. In the over two and a half years--
MR. MURPHY: Closer to the microphone please?
MR. LANG: In the over two and a half years
since then, representatives from ABC News, Sports,
Entertainment and broadcast operations and engineering,
have worked together to build the foundation of what
eventually will be a unified network film and tape
archive carefully houses, properly maintained, and
consistently indexed. The magnitude of this task is
daunting. ABC now holds approximately one million
separate reels and cassettes of network-owned material,
most but not all of it news footage.
At the time we began contemplating the
creation of a unified archive, these massive holdings
had long been balkanized into different collections,
located in different places, operated by different
divisions or departments, catalogued in different ways
and to different standards, and stored with different
levels of care. Even worse, we soon realized that some
unknown percentage of this material was in danger of
being lost.
For example, during preparation for a
retrospective Barbara Walters special, a number of
field tapes were retrieved from storage for viewing as
possible source material. Damage caused by adhesives
once used in the assembly of reels was discovered on
one important interview tape; other two-inch and even
newer one-inch reels were found to be dirty, brittle
and flaking; and there was mysterious warping damage
that caused tracking problems on an interview tape that
was only seven years old. It soon became obvious that
no easy fix for this problem would be forthcoming.
Even with all our resources, we could find no
technological Heracles capable of quickly cleansing
these, our video Augean stables.
Instead, ABC Broadcast Operations and
Engineering, the technical arm of the network,
proceeded to design and construct the ABC Media
Conservation Facility (the MCF) which is exclusively
dedicated to the on-going process of preserving the
network's videotape assets. Attached to our written
submission is a description of the MCF prepared by
David Chilson, the engineer who designed it. But I
would like to briefly discuss in general terms both the
facility and the way it works.
The physical space, approximately 2,000
square feet, is divided into two basic functional
areas: one for screening and the other for dubbing.
The screening area, which is not yet operational, will
be where representatives from ABC News, Sports and
Entertainment preview, when appropriate, endangered
tapes in order to determine whether any of the existing
material need not be dubbed to fresh stock. For
example, unlike film, videotape cameras are often
rolling several minutes before a newsmaker arrives at
the podium or in the doorway, and sometimes reporters
doing "stand-uppers" don't get it "right" the first
time. When multiplied by the myriad of news field
cassettes in the ABC inventory, excising repetitive
shots of unoccupied podia or pre-occupied reporters may
in the end save thousands of hours of dubbing time,
which translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars
in materials and labor costs. The costs of raw stock
alone is almost $100 an hour: $75 for D-2 and $25 for
beta oxide one hour cassettes.
In the dubbing area of the MCF, in order to
satisfy operating requirements as well as meet our
obligation to insure the long-term preservation of
valuable material, two copies of each endangered tape
are being made: an analog beta copy and a digital D-2
copy. Each fresh beta copy is returned to the shelves
of the working library from which it was plucked, and
the D-2 copy, the long-term archival storage copy, will
be placed in an appropriate facility either on or off
the company's premises, where it can quietly reside
until another working copy is required.
During our initial planning process, all
parties had agreed that the deteriorating copy, once it
had been dubbed afresh, could be discarded. Even a
mildly skeptical observer, however, might easily
conclude that only the intense pressure of overflowing
shelves will force this cleansing the deaccession to
occur.
Although D-2 is our initial choice of format
for long-term archival storage, it almost certainly
won't be our last. For the moment, at least,
considering the massive quantity of material with which
we have to deal, it meets our most pressing criteria;
it's digital, it's reliable, and it isn't ridiculously
expensive. As other options become viable, disk-based
media for example, we may move away from D-2. Indeed,
when disks become economically competitive with tape,
the random access capability of the disk format, plus
the likelihood of a very extended shelf life, would
certainly make it an attractive successor format.
Unfortunately, with a perpetual archiving
process that will involve changes in the selected
storage medium, one of our most troublesome concerns is
how to ensure that we continue to possess and maintain
the technical equipment required to permit the playback
of electronically stored images. Unlike printed paper
which presents itself directly to the human eye, analog
and digital signals are incomprehensible until played
back through an electronic mediating device that
converts them into recognizable pictures and sound. As
formats evolve, the greater risk lies not in the
eventual deterioration of properly stored archival
media, but in the probable unavailability of the
equipment, including spare parts, needed to play the
stuff back.
Like Proteus, formats and media will continue
to change. But great caution should be exercised
before scrapping one established archival storage
medium and substituting another. Considering the
volume of material with which we must deal, the
possibility of reconverting all previously archived
material to each successor medium to maintain some neat
consistency and eliminate the need for more than one
sort of playback device, would be both impractical and
uneconomic.
For entities like ABC, with several hundred
thousand hours of material on hand, the desire to
achieve preservation at a reasonable cost is obvious.
We must, therefore, seriously consider the possible use
of compression. Compression technology would permit a
radical reduction in the amount of both the storage
medium required and the space in which to house it.
The issue of whether it is archivally responsible to
compress video material is, we understand, a highly
charged one. Some opponents of compression pronounce
it anathema, maintaining that to use it is to
needlessly throw away a percentage of the material
which we are committed to save.
But what is the material to be preserved? Is
it the analog magnetic signal, or in the case of
digital formats all those ones and zeros resting on the
tape? Or is it instead the pictures and sound which
are created when these invisible elements are processed
by an electronic mediating device? If what we mean to
save are the images and sounds, and if they can be
created, using less electronic information, to a degree
virtually undetectable by any human being, then we have
preserved everything of value.
It is even possible to compress to a higher
standard than that of human comprehension. Using so-
called "lossless" compression, which is probably
slightly under two to one, image creation can occur to
a degree that preserves levels of sharpness and color
well beyond the capability of the human eye to discern.
And the difference between an uncompressed image and
one created at this low level of compression would be
virtually undetectable even to an electronic monitoring
device. In either case, the pictures and the sounds
will have been saved--at a significant savings.
Obviously, for material which may be used for
production purposes involving much editing or other
electronic manipulation, the less compression the
better. But for material which most likely will not be
subjected to intensive processing, the notion of a
compressed archival format should not be ruled out.
It would surely benefit ABC and the many
other public and private organizations who have decided
to preserve their respective videotape holdings, if
these and similar issues could be discussed on some
continuing basis. A forum is called for in which ideas
and information pertaining to the preservation of
videotape records can be shared. We certainly hope
that one outcome of these hearings will be periodic
gatherings at which the archival problems, both
technical and conceptual, which we encounter
individually, can be discussed and perhaps even solved
together. Thank you.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you, Michael Lang. Joel
Kanoff?
MR. KANOFF: ABC News is a for-profit
commercial network news organization providing news and
public affairs programming. Although not widely seen
at that time, the television network offered its first
newscast in 1948. This was followed in 1952 by a
weekly program called All Star News, and in the fall of
1953, eight months after ABC's merger with Paramount
Theaters by Leonard Goldenson, ABC started a regular
Monday through Friday news program anchored by veteran
newsman John Daly.
ABC broke new ground in the fall of 1958 with
the introduction of early and late evening news
programming, and in the late '60s, ABC joined the other
networks and increased its evening news program to 30
minutes. Barbara Walters became the first anchorwoman
of a network evening news broadcast in 1976. Under
Rune Arlege's leadership, innovative programs were
introduced, such as World News Tonight, 20-20, Prime
Time Live, This Week with David Brinkley, and
Nightline, the first regularly scheduled late-night
newscast of its kind to use satellite technology to
bring together leaders and experts for in-depth
discussions on the top stories of the day.
Over the years, ABC News has built a unique
and far-reaching news gathering organization
domestically and throughout the world. Currently among
other capitals there are bureaus in Beijing, London,
Moscow, Paris, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo.
As you may well imagine, preservation of
footage from past events and programming is of great
importance in a television network news universe.
While the majority of footage used is certainly newly
shot, each show contains archival footage. In a
typical World News Tonight edition, almost every spot
contains older footage used to put a fine point on a
subject, supply background, develop its history, or
just remind us of the continuity of our way of
government or of life itself.
ABC News will continue to collect the wide
variety of materials that reflect U.S. and
international news events, history and cultural trends,
religion, science and technology, environment and
wildlife. Our preservations efforts extend to footage
of events of every day society and every level of
magnitude. Footage of people from the most famous to
the obscure, the entire range of human social
activities, flora and fauna from everywhere, landscapes
and even still lifes of objects. That is to say
besides news, the collection includes a great deal of
generic footage, children in schools, people working in
factories, ships and airplanes, beauty shots, aerials,
all of which can be reused in a wide variety of
stories.
Our core collection consists of approximately
850,000 units of film and tape dating to 1960. Another
60,000 tapes and kinescopes are off-air records of
programs, current programs, as well as all but
forgotten programs such as Scope, Directions, ABC
Reports, The Reasoner Report, and Now. The core
collection is film-based through 1975, mostly 16mm
color reversal. Mixed film and eumatic through the
late '70s, eumatic until 1986, and beta cam to the
present. Roughly 12 per cent of the core collection is
film; about 47 per cent of the collection is beta cam;
the rest 3/4-inch. That is the core news collection
used by all programs for production. We also have many
millions of feet of film and many thousands of video
cassettes in storage. These are trends and production
elements for documentaries and magazine segments. The
further use of these production elements is more
restricted, so they do not circulate freely.
Roughly speaking, we save over 4,000 tapes a
month, about 5,000 in a political year such as this
one. No, we don't save everything, there just isn't
space. We immediately recycle a roll with a
correspondent's stand-ups, since we don't feel it's
important to save rehearsals for the final take, which
is of course preserved on the air history anyway. We
recycle graphic builds and multiple camera set-ups of
minor importance to the event recorded. But, with
regard to subject matter, because we try no to prejudge
and therefore not to dictate what will be important to
producers in the future, we tend to err on the side of
inclusivity.
By necessity, however, we do have to make
some difficult choices. Moreover, one shot may serve
for dozens of diverse future production requirements,
provided that the computerized description is
sufficient for it to be located objectively. Keeping
these issues in mind, library staff carefully evaluate
materials turned in by producers and camera crews at
all our bureaus and decide what materials to
permanently archive or to recycle.
News production demands swift, accurate
access of archive materials. However, the richness of
the videotape recording greatly reduces the
effectiveness of standard archival cataloguing methods.
Key words and brief subject classifications at best do
not do justice to, and at worst misstate and distort
the moving image. For that reason, an extensive
account of the visual an auditory contents of the
recording is necessary. Producers, researchers and
writers at ABC News rely on their ability to quickly
get a functional, verbal likeness of the recorded image
from our computer system. In proposing retrieval
requests to the system, these users may cast their net
as narrowly or as broadly as they like. They may call
up specific documents or thousands of documents,
although they may not request thousands of tapes.
Unlike the comparatively more relaxed
research done by documentary filmmakers, the television
news producer is forever working against the tightest
of deadlines to get the footage cut into that evening's
broadcast. Full text retrieval is practically
worthless without the hand of the diligent cataloguer.
In the ABC News idiom, cataloging refers to the
descriptive shot listing of the footage. The content
field of a typical 20-minute field recording can go on
for pages, depending on the substantive density of the
footage. In this scenario, catalogers must ask
themselves among the many things I see and hear, what
is important to describe here? Also, how might this
material be utilized again and within the guidelines of
the classification method, the style sheet and the
established lexical thesaurus, how will an army of
different producers seek to access it? That is, what
descriptive language will they use?
Cataloguing is a lengthy and continuing
process an the focus and dedication required enjoins us
from being as comprehensive as we would like. At
present we are able to fully shotlist on a percentage
of the new footage we acquire. Decisions must be made
as the potential usefulness of the work and ultimately
the significance of the story. Remember, everything
does get a record in the computer, but only the top
stories are catalogued. Nevertheless, cataloguing
brings in the clients. In the news film tape world,
the operative variant on "build it and they will come"
is "describe it and they will use it." It is axiomatic
that there is a direct proportional relationship
between the quantity and quality of catalogue detail
and the use of particular tapes and film.
We have traditionally provided and continue
to provide access to outside producers for the purpose
of stock footage sales and research. In 1989, it
occurred to us that what was lacking was a portable
index to our holdings. This was in the dawn of CD Rom
technology and in that format we were able to provide
an excellent word-searchable index to our footage with
retrieval software every bit as powerful as the Stairs
application that runs on our mainframe. We distributed
this to the outside source and sent many without cost
to libraries and information resources throughout the
world. Still, CD Rom disks are out of date from the
moment they are cut and we look to the Internet and
Worldwide Web to provide the means to distribute
information about our collection to outside stock
footage customers and to researchers in general.
Right now the entire CD Rom catalogue of news
footage, available for licensing from ABC News Video
Source is available on FootageNet on the Web. We have
great hopes for the future of electronic data, and in
coming years even retrieval of footage itself on the
Desktop. Unquestionably, the greatest benefit there
will be the provision of low-cost footage access to
educators at schools, universities, and non-profit
organizations throughout the country.
As I have said, the archive is a very
meaningful part of the production fabric. In fact, the
television news moving image collection has matured
into occupying a rather enviable status. It is not by
chance that now at the end of this century of the
moving image and electronic communication, that the
television library has found new friends and loyal
partisans. Having earlier learned the painful lesson
that you can't go out and reshoot history, the networks
are now more respectful of these valuable corporate
assets and resolute that they endure.
Besides the historical significance of this
footage, there is an economic consequence. While the
use of library holdings has enabled shows to keep costs
down, entire program concepts like the 20th Century
project at ABC and documentaries that we produce for
cable, have been developed around pre-existing footage.
Cost center libraries have become profit center
libraries.
Michael Lang has explained the MCF in detail,
so I won't go into that, except to say that the news
division in general and the news film library in
particular, having a big stake in the success of the
Media Conservation Facility, participated in the
planning of the facility from the earliest stages and
we are confident that appropriate, careful procedures
are in place for the preservation in logical stages of
the footage in our charge.
However, I should like to call your attention
to the fact that the preservation of footage in active
TV news archives commences well before the preservation
dubbing takes place. The term archive here tells only
half the story. The other half is best characterized
by the words circulating collection. In this respect,
we are also quite distinct from other types of
circulating TV collections like entertainment
collections because of the volume of circulation and
the extent of reuse. At any one time, we have an
average of close to 90,000 pieces in circulation, and
much like a public library, when original materials
circulate off the library premises, they are at risk
and we have to be concerned. Circulating tapes means
tapes getting worn, damaged, or worst, lost. Each run
across a recording head shave some of the magnetic
stratum off a tape. Unlike published materials, much
of the footage we collect is irreplaceable. It is true
that we are at the outset of technological changes
which will obviate the term wear and tear; that is, the
optical disk for storage of master materials, as well
as the concept of actual physical circulation. That
is, images will be distributed electronically and
digitally. Yet, for many years to come, we will be
circulating our tape, there's so much of it.
So the point here is that we often can't wait
for the scheduled preservation project to complete its
good work, for we will always be beleaguered by physics
as well as by the user who critically suffers amnesia
when it comes time to remembering what he or she did
with a cassette.
MR. MURPHY: Can you bring your statement to
a conclusion?
MR. KANOFF: Sure.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you.
MR. KANOFF: With the advent of the ABC News
24-hour channel, the library is again taking a vanguard
role in expanding its operations and facilitating the
use of the footage it maintains in ever more
challenging ways. A nexus of technological, cultural
and business advantages now in evidence, including the
Internet, HDTV, Interactivity, new digital video
formats, recent mergers, and an end of millennium
public that gives news a privileged place in every day
living, makes this a time of extraordinary opportunity
for the television news collection.
At this juncture it is especially important
for the Library of Congress, the National Archives and
other government institutions to work more closely with
the network archives to sponsor specialized discussions
or conferences devoted to the problems of the TV news
collection in particular and to cooperatively establish
criteria for the on-going deposit of network news
materials.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you, Joel. Doug McKinney?
I'm sorry, Donald DeCesare will go first?
MR. DE CESARE: Thank you very much. We say
DeCesare, by the way, although it defies linguistic
practice.
Good morning, and thank you for allowing me
and my colleague from the CBS News Archives to
participate in this important hearing.
First I ought to give you a little background
on myself. I've just completed six years as the
executive in charge of the archives; if not the
biggest, certainly one of the most respected
collections of broadcast material in the world. While
not a professional archivist myself, I've had to face
many of the same challenges that the professionals in
our organization and these organizations represented
here have faced. Beyond those, I had to plan the
budgets, get them approved, and spend the resulting
funds in accordance with sound business practices, as
well as sound preservation practices.
I've been a journalist for more than a
quarter century now and it's been my great privilege to
cover all the kinds of news stories that this world has
to offer, from sewer commission hearings, which is how
I started, to wars, revolutions, political, cultural,
social changes of all times. And I've continued to
work actively as a journalist even after I've entered
the management ranks. So, with that background, in
1990 I was asked to take charge of the archives, for
fine as they are, worthy as they are, vital I would say
to our work as they are, they had come under internal
criticism at the end of the last decade. There were
those within the parent company at that time who were
giving some consideration, believe it or not, to
disposing of the collection, both to the idea of
selling it off and also to the idea of having it
managed by outsiders on a royalty and fee basis. So
we faced then the most basic of all questions, I
suppose the one which brings us here today, why have a
collection at all?
After some study and introspection we
answered that. The archives are us. Everything we do
as a news organization, every event we cover, every
picture we take, every story we produce, every
broadcast we air, all are the bits in an ever-expanding
mosaic of human design. We are both the artisans and
the historians. To do our work, we must turn in full
circles over and over again, seeing where we were to
see where we are.
Once you recognize that news archives contain
everything that happened before today, and tomorrow
they will contain today, you understand that the
material there is uncontainably indispensable to your
daily work. Should you be without it, you would,
literally, have no reference points.
While studying the archives, we learned
something else, something practical which helped us
persuade our company to keep the collection and to
invest in it. We learned that nearly everything we
broadcast includes archival material. Were there to be
no CBS News Archives, there could be no CBS News. Even
our own company had begun to take for granted the
millions and millions of images and sounds we were
preserving. We had to say these are not artifacts,
they are in constant use.
Our collection with very few exceptions holds
everything that CBS News has ever done; that which
we've aired and that which we haven't, in every medium,
in audio, film, tape, stills, scripts, transcripts,
music, books, CD Roms, data cartridges, all of it. We
collect it, we index it, we store it, and we retrieve
it. It's a complicated and expensive enterprise, and
that's why people were very concerned about it back at
the end of the '80s. As I said, we learned it's
essential, and that our company now fervently believes.
And in so believing, the enterprise called the archives
thrives.
Well, we are, as you can guess from my
remarks, our own biggest customers, using our material
over and over in more and more ways. We program our
own network and now we help program others. We license
material to the best-known documentarians like NET and
the BBC, and we license to independent documentarians
as well. We've expanded our business relationships to
include feature film producers, corporate producers,
educational producers, even the general public. We're
so busy in fact and so much in need of ready access to
the material, that we are bringing it all back to New
York. All of our material, once scattered about
various warehouses in this state and others, will once
again be housed with us within the complex that we call
the CBS Broadcast Center. Where a few years ago we
considered selling the archives, now, selectively, we
are buying others, so as to assist in the preservation
of the irreplaceable images and sounds of our age.
So, are our problems behind us? Well, many
thankfully are, solved internally by the professionals
that you see represented here, who are passionate about
those obligations. But some new problems are emerging,
ones which may well require a broader perspective than
found within our own company. Because our material is
such a treasury, it's very important that at least one
other repository, the National Archives, have a
secondary collection of these jewels, as insurance
against some unthinkable catastrophe among us and as a
service to scholars and historians who cannot be well-
served by us. But should that be the only additional
collection? What if any obligation do we have to
support collections elsewhere, such as in universities,
presidential libraries, museums? There are those, some
in Congress I understand, who think that unauthorized
duplication and distribution of our material through
so-called clipping services should be considered fair
use. There are those who think that such use is
anything but fair, who think such services undermine
the editorial integrity of the product, while at the
same time siphoning revenue which could help pay the
high cost of building and maintaining the archives.
While we believe that all the rights to our
material rest with us and always will, we are fully
aware that digitization will bring even more
duplication, making possible even more possession and
distribution outside the ordinary authorized channels.
Inexorably, new ideas of ownership and new issues of
rights are evolving. We want to help others understand
these, and in turn, we ourselves need help in
understanding.
We can use public discussion of all of this,
and so we are particularly grateful for the opportunity
offered by these hearings, and I can assure you that we
are ready to do our part. Thank you for the time and
consideration. Let me ask Doug McKinney here, the
director of the CBS News Archives, to provide some, as
we call it around CBS News, context and perspective, to
these remarks.
MR. McKINNEY: It is with a combination of
some relief and awe that we come before this panel, the
nature of which has been imagined as a hope for
eventuality now gladly arrived. While many eloquent
voices are here to cry, we no longer face such a wilderness.
The preservation of entertainment programming
as it applies to CBS has been addressed by our other
counterparts at the Los Angeles hearing. Here in
tandem with Mr. DeCesare I'll focus my remarks on the
nature of the CBS News Archives, our efforts in
preservation, and end with a few suggestions addressing
the mission of this panel.
CBS has the largest collection of its kind
among the major networks, having kept and maintained
more material generally in addition to having started
earlier. Dating principally from 1950 to the present,
CBS News has well over one million video tapes,
including original field cassettes as well as program
broadcasts, and several million feet of hard news film
as well as another 80,000 containers of film and tape
masters, prints, program negatives, and out-take
material from long form documentaries and news magazine
programs. All materials are now stored in Manhattan on
approximately 60,000 square feet of climate controlled
space and all nitrate film was transferred to safety
stock some years ago, fortunately.
In addition, copies of the CBS Evening News
from the mid-'70s to the present and of many other CBS
News broadcasts, including special and documentary
programs, are on deposit at the National Archives, via
Library of Congress copyright registration.
Significant donated collections of CBS News material
for scholarly research and museum display are also part
of the holdings of the Museum of Television and Radio
and continually added to, and of the JFK and LBJ
Presidential Libraries, in particular.
We work with historians and researchers
wherever feasible and license news material for use in
as wide a variety of circumstances as there are uses of
reality based pictures and sounds. For motion pictures
such as Forrest Gump and Apollo 13 to children's school
reports. In addition to the CBS Network and CBS News,
archival programming can be seen regularly on seven
non-CBS cable networks. And in addition to the
preservation of network produced material, we have also
been involved in the preservation of material produced
by networked owned and operated stations, and to a
lesser degree other affiliates.
Our preservation priorities are in two
principal areas currently. Two-inch videotape, of
approximately 20,000 such tapes we have roughly 10,000
left to re-master, currently to D-2 and beta SP;
ironically the tapes themselves are in better condition
than anyone might have predicted. The urgency here is
stated in the limited number of machines left to play
them on, but the equally dwindling number of
experienced technicians who can operate the equipment.
The idiosyncratic variables involved in successful
archival two-inch playback, and Jim will appreciate
this, include archaic skills such as knowing when,
where and how to apply one's thumb to the tape path.
The other area of immediate technical concern
is more straightforward but of equal necessity. Three-
quarter-inch eumatic cassettes from that format's
introduction in the mid-'70s are reading the end of
their lifespan now. This is not particularly a problem
of equipment or personnel, as the format is still used
widely, but is an even greater problem due to volume.
The good news, which I know can be and has been echoed
by our colleagues at NBC and ABC is that a substitute,
fully representative amount of national network
television news has been preserved to date. The bad
news is that a great deal yet needs to be done,
particularly at the local level, if we are to avoid
losing a significant portion of the means of
understanding our social, political and cultural
identity, which is what television news represents.
Some recommendations. While the national
network's efforts are critical to our concerns here,
more help an coordination of assistance is needed at
the local and regional levels. Indeed the
recommendations to follow might also apply to network
television preservation, but resources are
understandably more limited at the local and regional
levels. If the national news presents daily swatches
of the fabric of our lives, it is local news and all
its particulars that often reveals the threads of that
fabric; and if the national news can appear as a crazy
quilt in time, so too does local coverage provide the
warp and wolf, often literally as well as figuratively.
But for the same reasons, a recording of the
President's press conference may be only as significant
as a tape of what Main Street in Memphis in March '96
looked like, let alone of Oklahoma City in March of
'95.
As it is a given that not even everything
worth savings will be preserved and the resources are
finite, criteria for preservation at any level are
necessary. But in addition to standard considerations
such as uniqueness and content significance, at least
one other condition should apply to local news material
invoking some test of content variety. This would
serve to include what by nature would necessarily
appear mundane now, but whose representational value
would increase with time. In that sense, we have
occasionally wished we had more of the background
material of the past which was discarded for having no
anticipated news value then, but which would have
uniquely representational value today.
It appears obvious that even a limited
nationwide program would necessarily require a
coordinating function. To that end, we suggest the
foundation of a nationally directed office for
television and video preservation coordination.
Adapting some of the mechanisms established for motion
picture preservation, such an office would (A) act as a
clearing house for the identification of materials in
need of preservation, to avoid unnecessary duplication
of effort, to direct those with material to those who
could provide needed transfer services, or to
coordinate the combination of small amounts of material
matched to facilities of great capacity. Not everyone
can afford to build facilities for long-term storage
nor do they need to. (B), assist in the formation of
relationships linking local independent stations or
video producers with appropriate local or regional
institutions, successful programs exist as models.
(C), administer and award preservation grants and/or
assist in coordinating the activities of preservation
funding sources, as well as preservation loans, to be
repaid from proceeds of subsequent exploitation by
rights holders. (D), help find homes for found,
donated or other such materials. This could include
linking rights-holders with found materials or enabling
the preservation of materials in private hands without
compromising the ownership or the permitted or
otherwise legitimate use of such materials, for
instance, home movies as well as quote unquote lost
television shows. (E), publish and/or otherwise
publicize a humanly comprehensive explanation of
copyright rules and guidelines for appropriate behavior
with respect to such rules. Realizing that this in
itself could take years or prove impossible given
expected changes in adaptations in light of developing
digital applications, it is not, however, facetious,
for it does need to be more widely recognized that were
it not for copyright protection, little of what we're
concerned with preserving would exist now. Finally,
establish a web site for information exchange. And
having scratched that surface, the issues of access
will require similar means of address and cooperative
coordination, but accessibility will improve in tandem
with preservation an will indeed foster further
preservation.
But for the moment, preservation must precede
access, and although this is a television hearing, we
don't have television facilities; Bill, I did bring a
clip, but overall the idea is to enable future
generations to see this, a clip of last night's evening
news, just as we are now able to see this, a clip of
the evening news from 1949. Thank you.
MR. MURPHY: Thank you, Doug.
MR. FRANCIS: This is maybe a rather rambling
question, but it's trying to summarize what we've heard
this morning. It seems to me that as far as national
news is concerned, both transmitted stories and
material which is not transmitted, there is a
commitment from all of you to preserve it for the
future.
I also heard one of you say that you felt it
was also important to have another copy of all
preserved material available in a national institution.
I believe that is an important point, and I hope there
will be some way, now that there are so many new
methods of dissemination (Internet, cable, etc.) that
all of you might feel this was a useful backup
considering all the money that you've put into
preservation. I was very pleased to hear that
mentioned.
But the one problem that's left is not a
preservation problem, but an access problem. I would
expect that you would all find it impossible to provide
individual access for scholarly purposes to the
materials that you hold. I'm really trying to think of
a way around this and one possible route (because I
understand that it's absolutely essential that you
control the material) would be to make a copy off-air
with time code invision. This could be done by an
organization like the Library of Congress, which could
become an access center for scholarly research. The
material would be secure, because it is a spoiled copy.
I don't know whether this is something you're
prepared to talk about or consider, but it seems that
from our perspective we have to find some way of making
available this sort of material for scholarly use
without putting that burden on you. And I don't know
whether anyone has a comment about that.
MR. DE CESARE: May I give it a try, sir?
MR. FRANCIS: Yes.
MR. DE CESARE: I'm the fellow who mentioned
the National Archives, so I'll give it a start. And
that's something we're very much committed to, we think
it's very important, it's a part of our responsibility
to the general public in what we have produced.
There's also a practical consideration in all
candor, and that is the scholars that you mention. We
do not have the facilities nor do we anticipate having
the facilities for daily scholarship kinds of work. We
have often been asked to provide this kind of facility,
but it's a very expensive undertaking. I don't suppose
I have to tell you that scholars are not in a position
to pay the kinds of commercial rates that commercial
producers pay and it presents a very big problem for
us.
What we have tried to do and what we're
wrestling with, and why I particularly mention the
copyright and rights issues, is by allowing the
material to go beyond ourselves and beyond the National
Archives, for example, to the various museums that we
lend material to or even give copies to, starts a chain
of events that as they then looking for sources of
funding seek to lend it themselves. And this is a big
problem that we're having right now with a particular
archive, a very respected institution, but one which
seeking funds for its own preservation purposes is now
commercially lending our own material. That is
something that we have to wrestle with. Where do we
stop the sense of responsibility to the nation and
where do we start some irresponsibility to ourselves?
Unfortunately I don't have the answer to that, but it's
one which we are wrestling with.
DR. BILLINGTON: Well, let me pursue that a
little, because it seems to me that's a very crucial
question. It seems to me that this is a very perilous
situation we're hearing described, because for
perfectly understandable and sensible commercial and
production reasons, you're all preserving much more
than you used to and you're much more conscious of it.
However, your concerns are necessarily and
properly essentially commercial and survival, you're
all competing against each other and against other
people. So you've got very important assets which you
sensibly are trying to recycle and use.
There is a very distinct public interest in
all of this which you all also recognize and it floats
in and out of your presentations. But it's not clearly
focused and it isn't clearly focused as they say in the
public sector either, so it's very confusing. I mean
each one of you have your archives basically in a
different institution for instance, just for starters.
All of those institutions are under financial pressures
also. So the kind of situation you're mentioning is
something that's going to increase. You're under
financial pressures, the public institutions are under
financial pressures, and I see an enormous mess
emerging with a great deal of institutional confusion
on all sides, unless something is done to clearly
establish and clearly fund the public interest part of
this, so that the fire wall is built up and it's kept
distinct and people are able to think seriously and
clearly instead of a muddle-headed way, where half of
the consideration is their own financial concerns,
which we all have, and half of it is very genuine,
public concern, which we all also feel. We're all
patriotic Americans and we all are concerned that our
children be able to figure out all the confusions we've
gone through in the second half of the 20th Century,
most of which involves television, as well as the
creativity and the successes, so forth. But that has
to be done.
Now what I'm suggesting is should there be
some distinct national institution, maybe apart from
the Library of Congress, apart from the Archives,
something set up specially, totally funded by the
television industry, but totally devoted to the public
part of this and established with a fire wall so that
it doesn't get mixed up in the promotion of television,
but is solely devoted to the preservation of it as a
public records for the United States, and maybe that
should be all-together different, maybe it should be
part of an existing institution. But it's sufficiently
important, and I don't hear out of this discussion how
it's going to emerge, and plotting the dotted lines,
everybody's under financial pressure, and we're going
to end up in a situation where the public part of this
is done in a highly uneconomical way, with half a dozen
institutions all struggling to do bits and pieces of
it, duplicating each other in an inefficient way.
Should there be some new institution--I
didn't come with this prepared speech in mind, but it's
prompted by the sincerity and the hopeful side of what
you're saying, that on the commercial side there is
considerable progress. Can we build on that and get
the commercial people to get together and basically
fund a central, national preservation facility and
institution? Is that a practical idea or is that
something you would never agree on?
MR. McKINNEY: If I may? There's a nay-sense
aspect or a foundational aspect even in the television
industry with the Museum of Television and Radio to
some extent as a means, because I think there were two
issues involved in what you were saying, one of access
and one of public custodianship if you will, as
distinct from network custodianship or rights-holders
ownership of its own material.
The Museum itself was founded by network
people, William Paley and the other networks--
DR. BILLINGTON: It doesn't really do any
serious preservation, does it? Well, boutique
preservation. It's not the same thing as serious
execution--
MR. McKINNEY: No, it doesn't. But rather
than duplicate the efforts, if the networks are going
to make the effort to preserve the materials initially
on their own, then supplying the Museum with a means of
access as a study center, and one of the problems is
the scholarly aspect of research for it, although we
can easily now imagine a future not too far down the
road where you can put things on the phone lines if you
want access to see it, I mean that's quite a ways down
the road still in terms of a practical aspect. Right
now if you want to research television you have to
physically travel to two or three places. That,
however, is more than you used to be able to, now that
the Museum has opened a branch in Los Angeles. You can
spend a couple of hours at the Museum in particular and
watch news or entertainment programming.
One of the beauties of it is that it is easy
to copy on material these days and the means of access
physically is much easier that it once was. You don't
need a projection room necessarily. Those things are
going to adapt. But on the national side, if material
is already stored as a safety measure in the national
archives, then you don't necessarily have to duplicate
everything everywhere, nor do you have to make it
necessarily all the aspects of the collection in one
central location. But the Museum itself is all ready
to some degree, to a large degree funded by the
industry as a--
DR. BILLINGTON: But it isn't doing film
preservation, that's my point--is it? With all due
respect, I'm not saying what they're doing isn't
important.
MR. FRANCIS: The Museum of Film and
Television is basically selecting programs that it
feels the public would like to have access to. I think
that we're talking about something different. We don't
know what the scholar wants to see in advance, so we
need to keep a broader range of program materials.
I think there is an important role for the
Museum because it is taking what are acknowledged to be
important programs and giving the public a chance to
see them. However, I think that's a totally different
sort of operation than the Library of Congress is
undertaking. We are trying to make available as broad
a spectrum of material as possible not knowing what
people want to see and without making pre-judgments
about that material. We get confused between these two
separate roles. The Museum satisfies one very well
indeed; but the other one, which is one that I think
the Library, the National Archives and other archives
are concerned about is not being satisfied. I think
this is what Dr. Billington is addressing, this second
area.
MR. McKINNEY: A place to go and sit down and
study television.
MR. FRANCIS: You don't know what people are
going to ask for until they come and ask for it, so
you've got to keep a broad range of things that are
acknowledged to be important and things which could not
be defined in advance as being important enough to put
in the Museum of Film and Television.
MR. MURPHY: Joel?
MR. KANOFF: Yes, without going into
different strata of interests in society for television
programming, there is a difference between the public,
I think as David is trying to say, and the scholar, the
scholarly need for access. And sometimes those things
overlap. But I think if you go into the Museum of
Television and Radio, which is an excellent
institution, on any |
