Preserving Digital Public Television: Not Just an Archive, but a New Attitude to Preserve Public Broadcasting

Public Television is responsible for the production, broadcast, and dissemination of programs which form the richest audiovisual source of cultural history in the United States.

(Librarian of Congress, 1997)

ABSTRACT

Television production has shifted rapidly from an analog process to one where virtually all programs are created and finalized as digital files. Such productions in public television are at great risk of being lost, because practices for long-term preservation of digital video are just now emerging, and because there is no mandate for preservation within the public broadcasting system. NDIIPP funded Preserving Digital Public Television, a partnership between WNET-TV in New York, WGBH-TV in Boston, PBS and New York University, to build a model preservation repository for digital video files and to examine the broader issues related to operating such a repository. In addition to designing the repository itself, the project became a lead advocate for adopting technical and metadata standards across the television field. The project also successfully challenged the public television system to recognize that preservation is necessary to keep digital productions alive. This resulted in public broadcasting allocating money for the first time to launch an initiative with a goal of properly managing its collective archival holdings.