Preserving Digital Public Television: Not Just an Archive, but a New Attitude to Preserve Public Broadcasting

Abstract

Television production has shifted rapidly from an analog process to one where virtually all programs are created and finalized as digital files. Such productions in public television are at great risk of being lost, because practices for long-term preservation of digital video are just now emerging, and because there is no mandate for preservation within the public broadcasting system. NDIIPP funded Preserving Digital Public Television, a partnership between WNET-TV in New York, WGBH-TV in Boston, PBS and New York University, to build a model preservation repository for digital video files and to examine the broader issues related to operating such a repository. In addition to designing the repository itself, the project became a lead advocate for adopting technical and metadata standards across the television field. The project also successfully challenged the public television system to recognize that preservation is necessary to keep digital productions alive. This resulted in public broadcasting allocating money for the first time to launch an initiative with a goal of properly managing its collective archival holdings.

Practice theory: a new approach for archival and recordkeeping research

“…The doctoral project briefly contextualized above is motivated by the observation that appraisal and preservation practice of moving image archives take on a new set of complexities and challenges in the digital domain. This view is supported by the literature on the topic (e.g., Connors, 2000;Besser, 2001;Rubin, 2009;Wright, 2011). After identifying appraisal and preservation practices as the focus of the project, the practice theory literature provided a new perspective for conceptualizing them.…”

Digital humanities, digital methods, digital history, and digital outputs: History writing and the digital revolution

“…With the rise of digital publishing even government publications and official documents are no longer automatically produced in hard copy, and private memories in the form of documents and photographs are also at risk (Copeland & Barreau, ; LeFurgy, ). As more processes move to digital production and their traces change, their archives must adapt or cease to capture them (Rubin, ).…”

A unified approach to content-based indexing and retrieval of digital videos from television archives

“…In Table 4 we present the average values of precision, recall, F1 measure and search time, obtained for scenario 1, taking into account the variation of the search distance threshold δ d of the k-d tree in interval [1,240,001], and without performing the filtering process enabled by the similarity measurement between the visual signatures of the query image and key-frames in the k-d tree. The ideal value for δ d is the one that ensures a maximum recall (all relevant videos are returned to the user, given a specific query image) at a computational cost that does not compromise the method's applicability in the context of the SAPTE system.…”

“…[1] In this scenario, huge digital video archives have been created by television companies, supporting for example, producers to store and edit new video productions, reporters to search relevant videos to re-use as background information and media researchers to investigate aspects of what has been broadcast. [2] Those video archives represent a vital component of the world's heritage and when combined with novel computing technologies have contributed to conceive new services around television and video platforms, such as Interactive TV [3] and Internet Television.…”