A Cooperative Model for Preserving Historical Television News Content

The archival profession must begin to confront the many challenges inherent in the large-scale preservation of twentieth century audio/visual resources. A significant portion of our shared cultural heritage, including historical television news recordings, is at risk due to complicated copyright issues, degradation of the original media, the cost involved in digitizing audio/visual resources, and the difficulty of preserving high resolution digital video files. Cooperation between heritage institutions and content creators facilitated by a Custodial Partnership Model is the key to overcoming these significant challenges. The University of North Texas (UNT) and the Dallas/Fort Worth (Texas) affiliate station of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC 5/KXAS) have partnered to preserve the content of the oldest television news station in Texas. This unique partnership will not only preserve over 60 years of television news content through the digitization of original 16mm film and video, but it will also result in free public access to the digitized content online. This paper will explain this partnership from the perspective of both the library and the television news station, and it will provide s possible solutions to the issues of copyright, funding and access to audio/visual collections. Examples from the UNT-NBC 5/KXAS partnership will serve to illustrate the crucial need to preserve audio/visual collections and the challenges facing institutions preserving large scale audio/visual collections. Lastly, this paper introduces the Custodial Partnership Model, a new paradigm for future heritage institution/content creator partnerships and recommendations for future modes of cooperation.