Interview with Nan Rubin, project director of the Preserving Public Television project, Page 2
What digital-preservation activities were already under way at PBS prior to your partnership with NDIIPP and when did they begin?
There haven't been any organized preservation activities relating specifically to digital program files. Both Thirteen, which has had an archive for about five years, and WGBH, which has had an archive in place for more than 15, have been using digi-Beta tapes for archiving purposes and treating the tapes like analog materials. PBS is in a similar position, but they have a lot more programs to handle and can barely put tapes on shelves.
At the moment, the most extensive storage treatment of digital files is when programs are put onto servers for broadcast playout. What used to be a station's tape library is now a server that is generally referred to as the "archives," meaning programs are stored as digital files on some storage device until they are scheduled for air.
Since most programs have broadcast rights for three to four years, stations are now in the process of ingesting and storing these large program libraries for at least three to five years. After that, when the broadcast rights of any given program have expired, the automation system can be set to automatically purge the files so that the program is no longer available to be scheduled for broadcast.
Using servers instead of videotape machines as the source of playing back programs is relatively recent. They rely on a combination of different systems working together, including different program recording, storage and playback devices, all controlled by the station's automation system; any given station is likely to have a mix of both digital and analog devices that are slowly being replaced completely with a digital broadcast chain.
Getting all these computers to work well together is not easy. At WNET the system has been in place for barely two years, and many stations are just now in the process of acquiring the components they don't have so they can put a complete system in place.
Even so, none of these program storage systems are designed for long-term preservation. Our project is the first one anywhere within public television that is specifically aimed at designing a system for digital preservation.
Has there been any systematic conversion of analog programs to digital?
The stations with archives, Thirteen and WGBH, are able to do analog-to-digital remastering only on a sporadic basis because of the cost. Neither station has discretionary funds that can be used for this activity, so that, in general, such remastering is done "on-demand" – when another party has offered to pay the costs, or there is such a clear need or value to the materials that the station sees it as an important investment.
For example, Thirteen was able to digitize and remaster a collection of 75-plus programs from the '60s and '70s through a collaboration with the Broadway Theatre Archive, a commercial venture that covered all the costs plus made the major investment in clearing rights so the programs could be sold for home video. The station would never have taken on such a major digitizing project without dedicated funding.
At PBS, they have done no conversion of old materials, except that they are ingesting all their current programs now, as they are getting ready to start distributing digital files for broadcast.
There have been some smaller-scale local efforts, notably the Kentucky Educational Television Digital Archives project, which had a goal of transferring its entire videotape program library to hard drive -- 6,549 tapes running 4,380 hours. It was paid for by an anonymous donation of $300,000 and matched by a grant from a local foundation.
More recently, Bill Moyers, as an independent producer, is starting to make plans to begin digitizing all of his own productions, spanning more than 20 years of materials.
