What’s going on right now in news and television preservation?

I'm sure there is a lot going on in both of these areas, but I decided to focus on a project currently underway, funded by the Library of Congress, called Preserving Digital Public Television. ( http://ptvdigitalarchive.org/ ) While some programs are still shot on film or on analog video, many are digitally shot, and virtually all of them are digitally edited. This digital content needs to be preserved. The program site states that there is no mandate and little funding for the preservation of the rich cultural resource that is public television. The project is working on developing a repository and standards, creating a test model, creating guidelines for appraisal and looking at possible sources of funding for the project.

The Web site also discusses the difference between preserving the analog materials and the born-digital files:

“We are rapidly approaching the “tapeless environment” – where programs will live solely as “disembodied” assets, attached to their metadata, distributed and stored in a totally digital environment. This introduces an entirely new set of issues and problems relating to long-term program preservation, for which no coordinated strategy yet exists in public television.

While digital material is generally easier to duplicate, it is also more fragile. Hard disks fail at the rate of roughly 2 percent per year, which means that digital materials must be constantly checked, backed up, restored, and migrated from older to new disks.”

They have been making inventories of at risk programs and creating educational materials on file formats and metadata. They are also working with Turner Broadcasting to develop a standard MXF wrapper for preservation of program files.

In the future they hope to work preservation into the workflow of news and television programs. They are working with PBS and NYU on this project. The organization of the project is made more difficult because video and analog materials are not all stored together, and even though they are public programs, copyright is an issue.

CPB has been developing the PBCore metadata standard. (http://www.pbcore.org/ ). PBCore is similar to a Dublin Core (http://dublincore.org/) schema. Similar elements include Identifier, Title, Subject, Description, Creator, Language, etc. Some of the elements I did not recognize from DublinCore were AudienceLevel and AudienceRating.

To compare what the U.S. is doing to other countries the Web Site writes, that while the U.S. is having problems making things accessible online because of copyright, the BBC, the The Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) in France, and programs in the Netherlands and Japan, are all working to put massive amounts of material online and accessible.

Finally, if you are interested, here is a Web cast of Nan Rubin about preserving digital public television at Thirteen. http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=3848