Broadcast and Satellite Television, Session # 3
NDIIPP Annual Meeting
Wednesday July 9, 2008
10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.

Presenters:  
Marshal Breeding, Vanderbilt Television News Archive (on phone); Rod Hewitt, CoolSTF.com; Greg Lukow and James Snyder, Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division; Deborah Rossum and Rebecca J. Tejral, SCOLA; Nan Rubin and Jonathan Marmor, WNET/13 

Attendees: 23

Overview: The first part of this session focused on the challenges faced by three different organizations that are capturing broadcast and satellite-carried television content for preservation and cultural heritage purposes. 

The Vanderbilt News Archive has been collecting television news programming in both analog and digital form since 1968. Since 2002 they have been recording directly to digital, with a concentration on the “big three” broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), with some additional content from CNN and Fox News. Metadata about the broadcasts is composed by staff and stored in a database in qualified Dublin Core. Access is provided through a public website, as well as through the on-campus integrated library system. 

SCOLA is a non-profit based in Iowa that captures and archives news broadcasts from more than 80 nations around the world, and in more than 90 languages. Of this, about 8,000 hours per year from about 40 nations is provided to the Library for its collections.  Half of their programming is gathered by satellite, with the remainder received on DVD and VHS. They are currently making the switch between transmitting to their customers via satellite to a dual system: satellite and the Internet.  As they make this change, they are developing a more sophisticated archive.   For some programs, they extract metadata from the broadcasts, then add additional English-language metadata.  For all programs, their metadata provides the original broadcast date and the SCOLA broadcast date.  Access to the materials is provided to subscribers via the SCOLA web site. 

Rod Hewitt from coolstf.com is a consultant providing video capture services. He is currently capturing 20 channels of video content utilizing the Dish network and ExpressView for Canadian content. His current system is analog-input based, with the content then encoded to MPEG-2 Program Stream files. For metadata, the digital archiving system extracts captions and subtitles, and creates an XML index to each event recorded. It also takes advantage of other embedded metadata, the type of date that feeds into the program guide that home viewers receive as part of a satellite-delivery package. Hewitt is doing this with the sponsorship of an unnamed donor; the material is not made accessible due to copyright restrictions. 

The next part of the session focused on the technical preservation workflows being developed at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Video Conservation Center and those being proposed by the Library-supported project Preserving Digital Public Television.  At Culpeper, there will also be capture activity in which as many as ten streams from satellite or other external services can be captured simultaneously.  This work proceeds under the legal framework established in the American Television and Radio Archives Act (ATRA), part of the 1976 copyright act.

Action Items: None.