Sustaining television news archives

Abstract

This paper reports on the findings of a sustainability study of television news archives conducted in 2018. After reviewing the history of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, the paper discusses the questions raised by the sustainability project. What are the legal, economic, and technical issues that archivists need to consider when preserving television news, making their collections accessible to the public, and allowing researchers to explore their holdings through emerging technologies like data and text mining? The second half of the paper considers ways that nonprofit television news archives might collaborate more closely. While sharing and aggregating standardised metadata would constitute a promising step toward that goal, the paper highlights three other potential avenues of coordination. First, the legal basis for data mining nonprofit video archives should be clarified in order to meet the growing demand among researchers for this mode of computational inquiry. Second, on a technical level, broader adoption of descriptive metadata with full-text transcriptions would make it easier to analyse collections with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Finally, the sustainability of nonprofit television news archiving over the longterm requires acknowledgment and accommodation of the diversity of publics that these archives serve as well as of their distinctive financial models.