From analogue to digital: The evolutionary design of the C-SPAN Archives

Abstract

Preserving television is an increasingly important goal as television dominates the way the public gets news and public affairs information. This paper recounts how the C-SPAN Archives was created to preserve, index and distribute the public affairs content of the C-SPAN cable public affairs network. Now with over 220,000 indexed, online digital hours, it is one of the most accessible collections of televised public affairs programming. The initial design of the archive in 1986 was analogue and built on small personal computers. That design anticipated the digital revolution, and through the development of its database, the information was organised in such a way that the whole system could easily be converted to digital. This paper discusses how this archive was initially conceived, how it evolved from analogue to digital, and how it exists today, indexed to the speaker level.