Internet Librarian: Repositories in Action
[These are my rough notes about the session. I will read through them and do any polishing later.]
Internet Librarian: Repositories in Action
Judi Briden of the University of Rochester introduced us to UR’s DSpace project and how researchers are using it to store their materials.
Marshall Breeding of the Television News Archive at Vanderbilt University discussed the purpose and history of the archive, which began in 1968 as a three month experiment. It is the largest and most comprehensive collection of national broadcast news available to the general public. It’s possible to search across all of the major networks. Describing the collection is very important. As you might imagine, there’s a lot of abstracts and indexing. The three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NCB) are included since 1968. They started taping CBB in 1985, but didn’t begin indexing it until 1996. Fox News is a newcomer, being included since about 2004.
They have a database to search the text by keyword. They have a tape loan service. There’s also a subscription model available to universities and colleges. The fees support the collection. The subscription model came about as a way to raise funds. It pays for about 25% of the budget. They don’t own the material, so they don’t have the rights to it.
They knew that digitizing the archive would be very important. More preservation options with digital materials than with VHS tape. They’re digitizing into MPEG-2s. Storage is not as significant now as it was at the beginning of the project because of how much technology has changed. They use RealMedia for streaming. Capturing the closed caption information is one of the most difficult things to do during the conversion process.
They have partnered with the Library of Congress from almost the beginning. The LoC has been charged with collection television news. They rely on this archive for that. The LoC pays them a stipend each year that’s about 25% of the operating budget of the archive.
The legal issues of having this kind of archive cause a lot of problems. CBS sued Vanderbilt at one point over the archive. At the time, the Copyright Law was under review. One of the lawmakers inserted language into the law to protect the work of Vanderbilt University. Streaming content falls under the performance clauses of the Copyright Law, so the legal issues are entirely different. The Broadcast Flag, which is part of the FCC and is a way a broadcaster can prevent people from redistributing their content, is another problem, but Vanderbilt thinks they’re ok with that. They’re working with the Librarian of Congress to ensure that Copyright Law works with what they’re doing.
A big part of the budget goes to people who working on providing textual access to the news. Indexing and abstracting the news takes about an extra hour per hour of newscast. They can’t possibly expand their work until they figure out how to do everything with lower costs.
Hardly any local television station has any system in place to save their broadcasts. He wants to work on building programs to capture local news.
Q: about requests from various television shows
A: As much as the national networks wish they didn’t exist, they do often request their own material.
Q: Do you do any archiving of PBS news?
A: No. We talked to them about it, but we can’t take on any more news programs until we have more funding. Each show equals about one full-time employee.
Television is often about short-term memory. Our archive is about long-term memory.
Q: How do you capture the shows and what about commercials?
A: We use the local cable service. We tried satellites and antennas, but they aren’t reliable. We do capture the commercials and they get lots of requests for them.
Tag: il2006
