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Why Digital Preservation Is Important For Everyone
Check out a short video about the basics of digital preservation.
Interview with Nan Rubin, project director of the Preserving Public Television project, Page 3
You say in your project description that you will form an advisory committee "to develop criteria for selecting and cataloging materials for preservation." Has this been formed? If so, what has been accomplished so far?
We have not yet formed any formal advisory committees. However, we have collected a large number of names of interested folks, through a series of focus groups; from listservs and online discussions, and by making presentations at public television and other gatherings. During this second project year, I expect we will draw on our growing lists to organize one or more formal groups of advisers for the project.
Will the work of this committee replicate work done for analog programming? In other words, have you also had to make choices on which PBS analog programs should be preserved? If so, can you briefly describe the selection criteria and state how these criteria will apply to digital programs?
There is no comparable committee working with analog programming – the preservation policies that Thirteen and WGBH have in place are devised and administered by staff based solely on business, legal and other practical considerations. None of us have any committees involved with assessing the materials.
With no money to speak of for preservation, current collection practices at each entity rest largely on saving materials to which each owns the rights and thus has the potential to resell commercially. At PBS, copies of all nationally distributed programs are saved by contract agreement with the Library of Congress, and as the deposit copy for the Copyright Office.
Do you foresee/have you already identified any issues related to intellectual property rights that did not apply to your preservation of analog programming?
The biggest issue we face regarding intellectual property rights is that, among all the myriad rights "markets" that are available for program distribution, there is nothing explicit giving us rights for long-term preservation and access. The rights for analog materials are similar, and preservation rights can also be very muddy.
As the digital world has vastly expanded the possible distribution channels of any given work, the competition over rights and content control has become both fragmented and fierce. There is great uncertainty over our ability to acquire or exercise preservation rights to material that is not totally ours, and this is an area we need to pursue.
For PBS, which owns nothing, extending the rights from distribution only to preservation may not sound like that big a leap -- except that negotiating the rights for who can have access to the materials once they are preserved is a huge issue and one that PBS is not eager to take up.
Has PBS moved any of its programming to a tapeless environment, whereby programs are aired directly from a server?
At both WGBH and Thirteen, our broadcast chains are already tapeless. That transition at PBS is currently under way and is scheduled to be completed by the end of calendar year 2006. [See my discussion above about the differentiation of the stations from PBS.]
