New approaches to television archiving

Abstract:  Worldwide, more than 30 million hours of unique television programming are broadcast every year, yet only a tiny fraction of it is preserved for future reference, and only a fraction of that preserved footage is publicly accessible. Most television broadcasts are simply lost forever, though television archivists have been working to preserve selected programs for fifty years. Recent reductions in the cost of storage of digital video could allow preservation of this portion of our culture for a small fraction of the worldwide library budget, and improvements in the distribution of online video could enable much greater collaboration between archival institutions. ... Link: First Monday.  The author, Jeff Ubois, is a staff research associate at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems.  He has a weblog about television archiving and digital video at www.archival.tv.